


An Alpha’s Duties

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gangbang, Heats, Implied Mpreg, Injury Recovery, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Parent/Child Incest, Rape, Rape Recovery, Violence, non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 17:42:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16142255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Written for the kink meme for a prompt that wanted Dean to go to school one day while he was in heat and not realize it. No one sends Dean home because rules forbid talking to an Omega about their heat. Dean ends up cornered by a pack of boys in the locker room and viciously attacked and raped. He valiantly fights back but there are too many. Sam realizes something is wrong when Dean doesn’t pick him up after school and gets teachers to help him find Dean, who is taken to the hospital.John hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that Dean was presenting as Omega and was nearly ready for a heat. They live in a society where it’s considered an Alpha’s prerogative, even duty, to claim his oldest Omega child as his own (younger are off limits). He hasn’t been ready for that with Dean. But when he gets the call that Dean has been brutally attacked, he realizes just how much he has been let slipping and it becomes clear to him what his duties are.Warnings- graphic depictions of gang rape and also a society where certain types of parent child incest are normal.





	An Alpha’s Duties

"I don't think we should go to school today, Dean," Sam said as they were poking around the motel room that was their temporary home, getting ready to face the day. Dean had been having one last round with the magic fingers, using his lunch money to buy himself a little bit of bliss, one quarter at a time. But when Sam said that, Dean sat up to attention immediately, even though the bed was still vibrating. 

"Who are you and what have you done with my brother?" Dean demanded.

Sam scowled, thought a moment so obviously Dean could practically see the cogs turning in his smart little noggin and said, "It's just that I don't feel well and I want you to stay home and take care of me."

Sam looked just fine. Normally, Dean could read even the slightest ache or pain on his expressive face, but he was looking normal, if a little worried for some reason. It took a serious illness before Sam ever admitted to feeling unwell. 

"Besides, Dad could be back any day now and he's just going to pull us out of school, so it doesn't matter if we miss a day," Sam said. He was kind of whiny sounding actually.

It wasn't that Dean wasn't tempted. He felt kind of sick himself, a bit hot around the face, flushed, but when he'd taken his temperature it wasn't really a fever. Just ninety-nine degrees. It pretty much didn't count until it'd risen over a hundred degrees. Besides Dad had made it pretty clear- a Winchester wasn't sick until he was ready to be dragged to the hospital. 

"We're going," Dean said. "Dad comes back and finds us playing hooky, all hell will break loose and you know it."

So they got on with getting ready with to go to school. The sooner they got to school, the sooner the day would be over, and it was Friday, so he just had to get through the day then it'd be the weekend. Dean hated school. Even though he was sixteen, the school had enrolled him as a freshman in high school, in remedial classes even, and that meant being the bottom of the heap again. He'd had a good couple of years as pretty much the coolest thing that had ever rolled through the last several middle schools he'd been to. And there had been a lot of them. Dad seemed set on moving on every couple of months, even every couple of weeks. 

Not only was Dean the bottom of the heap at the new school, this school was worse than most. It was a school in bumfuck nowhere, Illinois and the one thing, the only thing the whole town had going for it was the local high school football team. They were last year's regional champions, had nearly been state champions in their division too. The football players were top of the heap, the heroes, not just of the school but of the whole damn town. If they pushed the freshmen around, did a bit of mild bullying, no one in authority said boo. Dean thought he could take one of those slabs of muscle, no problem. The bigger they were, the harder they fall and all that, but it was easier, better to hold that card close to his chest, for the day he might really need it. Because Dean had a secret. He thought he was turning Omega. 

All preadolescent sons of Alpha males were called Alphas by courtesy, but the fact was, they weren't. They were undifferentiated until adolescence hit and they presented one way or the other- Alpha or Omega. If you stayed Alpha, you grew a knot. If you presented as Omega, your pussy opened up. Your, until then, vestigial uterus and ovaries developed. You started getting heats. That was about all Dean had managed to piece together about what happened to Omegas hitting adolescence. It seemed that every time they changed schools, the sex ed part of health class was already over, or it hadn't happened yet by the time he was pulled out and moved. 

Dean could feel it, between his legs, how it got slippery and wet back there now. He hadn't had the courage yet to reach in between his legs, behind his small dick and balls and touch it. His pussy. He knew he had one. Technically, Alphas did too- but they never opened up, stayed tight and dry, sealed shut. 

Dad hadn't seemed to notice yet that Dean was starting to present and that was both a relief and a worry. Maybe he'd notice soon. It was a relief that Dad hadn't noticed yet because he was his Dad's oldest Omega and that meant Dad might decide to claim him. That meant sex and maybe babies and all kinds of things Dean wasn't ready for. But it was a worry, because everyone knew that an unclaimed Omega was in all kinds of danger. They could be be claimed by someone else. Used. Things people whispered about. Sex. 

After he gathered the last of their stuff, it was a quick walk to the middle school. Dean dropped Sam off. This town, they put the eighth graders in with the middle school kids. Last town, they'd been in the elementary school. 

"Let's just go back home. Please, Dean," Sam said. He was begging, which was weird, because Sam never begged any more, not since Dean had told him the truth about what Dad did. Sam had grown up a lot, really fast after that day. "I just don't feel right."

"You're fine, Sammy. Just buck up. It's Friday and you can mope around the hotel room all weekend," Dean said. "The day'll be over before you know it."

So Dean left Sam behind and trudged the few blocks over to the high school. He didn't bother with his locker, just kept his back pack with all his books with him. He could drop it off at the start of second period. Even so, he slid into his seat in home room just in time for the last bell. People stared at him and he didn't think it was because he was so late. It was just kind of strange. 

When the teacher, a guy who taught health and gym class, an old Alpha, took attendance, he frowned at Dean and said, "Are you quite well, Mr. Winchester? Do you think you should go to the nurse's office?"

"I'm fine, Mr. Federer," Dean said, but he could feel his face flush even more and something in his gut was really aching hard. Sort of like when you've got diarrhea, but not quite. Then there was the general ache in his whole body. Still, Dean remembered what Dad said about being sick. You toughed it out until you couldn't any more. 

"You don't look fine. You're flushed," Mr. Federer said. "But I can't make you go."

It was like that the whole day. People staring at him. Teachers asking him if he needed to go to the nurse's office, even offering to send one of the girls in the class to escort him there. Always a girl for some reason. Right before lunch time, Dean had gym class and he was about to head into the locker room, to grab a shower, when Miss LaDouce, the kids all called her the Douche of course, his gym teacher pulled him aside and said, "Don't shower. Just grab your clothes and go to the nurse's office. Look, I'm not supposed to say anything about it to you. School regs. But really, you need to not be here right now, Dean."

"Why? I'm fine. What is wrong with everyone today?" he asked.

"You're sure you're fine?" she asked, looking worried. "Well, I can't force you to go. But be careful."

Dean was puzzled, but he went into the locker room, not exactly oblivious, but distracted. He didn't think anything was wrong, even though the room was quiet, way quieter than it should be. He didn't think anything was amiss as he stripped out of his gym uniform and went into the shower. He didn't think anything was wrong even though he was the only one from his class that went into the shower. He didn't think anything was wrong, right up until the point where the first upperclassman grabbed him around the upper arms and wrenched them behind him to the point of pain. 

***

Janie LaDouce watched Dean Winchester walk confidently into the locker room. He was a cocky little son of a bitch, especially for an Omega, always ready with a smart alec remark and a grin. She liked him, even though she supposed she probably shouldn't. He wasn't exactly a discipline problem, but she never could escape the feeling that he was loafing in her class, that he could do so much better if he actually made a little effort. Like he could be an amazing athlete, but nothing she could do could get him interested in any of the teams, or in even making his best effort when they played team sports in class. The one and only time she'd seen him interested in her classes had been about six weeks ago, when he'd first started at this school. They were in the first nine weeks of the semester and her class had been on an archery rotation. Dean unleashed bullseye after bullseye, with steady hand and the best damn eye she'd ever seen on a kid his age. Then archery rotation was over and they were back to mixed gym sports, like basketball and badminton and Dean had gotten lazy and bored.

Still, she worried about letting him walk into that locker room by himself. The floral, musky scent of his heat had increased during her class, probably because she'd set him to laps when he'd called her sweetheart, and he was sweating. It was almost like he didn't know he was in heat. He'd looked at her blankly when she'd told him he should go to the nurse's office in that certain tone of voice. Any student should have known something was up by her particular usage and tone. He wouldn't be walking into that locker room if he knew what was happening with him, would he? Damn school regulations that prevented them from even mentioning heats in any way to a student outside of the pre-approved, state curriculum sex-education. Somebody would probably get hurt some day because of it. 

Janie was disrupted from her musing about Dean by the sound of a scream and a crash behind her. She turned just in time to watch Tiffany Sanderson crumple to the ground in a heap at the base of the bleachers, having just fallen several steps. The girl was thin, too thin to the point where it was probably a problem and she spent her lunch hour running up and down the bleachers. Janie had tried to get her barred from this, for the danger factor, but the girl's cross-country coach had stepped in and gotten it allowed. Janie was busy for the next half hour, getting ice packs, getting Tiffany to the nurse when it became clear that this was more than just a sprained wrist, filling out an incident report and by the time she was done, Dean Winchester had slipped her mind entirely. 

***

Dean automatically kicked out behind him, hoping to get a knee or some other vulnerable part, but he only landed a glancing blow and his arms were wrenched tighter yet. Then he was lifted up. His feet lost contact with the floor, but he didn't think he was lost yet, despite the fact that he could just feel that his attacker was so much huger than himself. Like the guy was near as big as Dad. He kicked back again and landed a solid, palpable blow to guy's legs, near the knee, which buckled. The guy didn't go down though. He just cursed.

Then he turned and he bashed Dean into the tile wall. "Fucking bitch," his attacker snarled as Dean's body crashed. His head bounced off the wall and things went a little swimmy for a moment. 

"Not your Goddamn bitch," Dean yelled, lashing out as best he could, but then he knew he was lost, because suddenly all of the upperclassmen in the shower were rounding on him. By the time there were a couple of them on each limb, he was effectively immobilized. These weren't just kids older than him, they were mammoth hunks of muscle, nearly fully grown Alphas and they were, the ones that Dean recognized, on the the football team. Maybe they hadn't been taught to fight like Dean had, but they were used to using their bodies as weapons. Not to mention, he was vastly out numbered. One he could have taken. Maybe two. Ten of them? No way. 

He was being moved, taken out of the shower. The football team had their own locker room, but it connected with the main locker room used for gym classes. Dean hollered as loud as he could, hoping that maybe one of the teachers might hear him. Whatever these guys were moving him for, it wasn't good intentions. Maybe they were just planning to beat the crap out of him, just because they could. Because he'd kicked their buddy. But Dean didn't think so. 

Dean tried to think of what his father would do in this circumstance and all he could think of was Dad telling him that he couldn't win, then he should cede no ground, hold the territory he had, and if he couldn't do that, then he had to survive. Then all he could think of was how much he wanted his Dad, like it was a physical pain. His Dad would put these knuckleheads in their places. But Dad was off in the next state, hunting rawheads. He was going to be back soon. They probably wouldn't be in this school come Monday morning.

The football player's locker room was just like the gym lockers, but the locker's themselves were bigger. Probably had to be to accommodate the equipment, the shoulder pads and helmets. Wooden benches lined the rows between the lockers and Dean was slammed down onto one of these, knocking the wind out of him temporarily. He should have used the time to scrabble to his feet and get out of there, but he couldn't even draw a breath, much less coordinate an effort to get out of here. Deke Kaczinski, the star quarterback and the guy who'd first attacked Dean, sat down on Dean's abdomen, right atop the diaphragm, so that when Dean did get his wind back, he could take only shallow, painful breaths. Dean flung his limbs around, trying to get some leverage, trying to get out from under the Alpha

"Never seen an Omega with such pretty lips," Kaczinksi said. "Gonna have a good time putting them to use. We are going to have so much fun."

It was suddenly clear to Dean just what they'd brought him in here for. The we who was going to be having fun did not include Dean. 

He was surrounded by about ten Alphas, all older than him, all bigger than him. They were all naked or mostly naked. All of them had erections, some of them palming them idly, some erections just out in the breeze, bobbing with their owners movements. They were, all of them, intending to fuck him and that was something he very much didn't want, but he wasn't going to beg.

"You stick your dick in my mouth I'll bite it off and spit it out," Dean threatened. 

Kaczinski just laughed. "It's funny how many times I've heard that but nobody has yet. You bitches are all alike. You have to act like this so people won't think you're easy but by the time you've had a little fun with us, you'll be gagging for it. Begging me to stick it in your mouth and all the rest of your holes. You're just like any other Omega. You're nothing but a hole in need of a knot."

"I mean it. I'll fucking bite it off."

"Well, you got no teeth down where it counts," Kaczinski said and he reached behind him and grabbed Dean between the legs. The Alpha's big hands smacked hard on Dean's balls first, bringing white out quality pain. When Dean could finally focus again, he realized that big, calloused fingers were jammed tight into his pussy, which hadn't had so much as one of Dean's fingers in it before. It burned with the stretch, but those fingers were moving easily in and out thanks to the way Dean's pussy was sloppy wet with his own natural slick. Then those fingers were withdrawn and Kaczinski said, "Look at that, boys. All that juice. This cunt is begging for it. Think we got enough dick between us to satisfy this slut?" 

There were murmurs of agreement from the crowd of Alphas. 

"I'll break him in," Kaczinski said. "Probably just the one hole until he settles down. He's still acting like he doesn't want this."

"I don't want this," Dean protested. 

"Then what the hell were you doing, prancing around naked in the shower, in heat? C'mon, is a smart little bitch like you going to do something stupid like that? You want it or you'd have been home, locked up tight, like a good Omega."

What did he mean? In heat? And then it hit Dean, the thing that everyone had been dancing around all day, the reason he'd been feverish and aching. He wasn't sick. He was in heat. Why hadn't anyone come right out and said something to him? Apparently, it'd been pretty obvious to everyone else that he was in heat even if he himself had been oblivious. The teachers who'd tried to get him out of school, shouldn't they have tried harder? Why didn't one of his class mates take him aside and whisper something at him. It wasn't like he was the only Omega in the school by far. He'd been in heat, hadn't known it and it had landed him here, with a hundred and seventy-five or so pounds of quarterback on his stomach, rape very much in his immediate future. 

He could feel the tears start to prick at the corners of his eyes and he felt lost, so very lost, on the verge of surrender. Then he got angry. 

"You do this, Kaczinski, I will fucking kill you. All of you. I will fucking kill you," he said, struggling to get out from under the Alpha. 

Kaczinski just chuckled and forced his fingers into Dean's pussy again, and fucked them in and out a moment before he said, "Big talk from a pretty little Omega. Your pussy don't lie and this pussy is dripping wet and asking for a knot."

The Alphas holding on to Dean's legs were only holding on to the feet. They weren't holding tightly and though they held the feet apart, Dean actually had a lot of play in his legs. He turned his knees inward a bit as he squeezed his inner thighs together as hard as he could, trapping Kaczinski's hand between them. Dean's muscles might not have been as big as the football player's around them, they were hard and tough with years of training. He pressured Kaczinski's hand between his thighs like a nutcracker, got it in a good position so he was applying pressure to both sides of the hands, not the flat sides, then he twisted his hips suddenly and viciously, wrenching the hand between his legs. Dean hoped it'd be enough to give him the momentum he needed to get out from underneath the football player. The Alpha did bellow, but he couldn't be shaken. Dean just couldn't get enough leverage. When the Alpha finally did tear his hand from between Dean's legs, he punched Dean in the eye. He punched full on, a good wind up and follow through. Dad would have approved of his technique. 

It hurt so much Dean thought he'd see stars. He didn't. He blacked out for a moment and when he came to again, Dean couldn't move because the other football players had gotten an adamant grip on each of his limbs. Dean's eye throbbed in pain and it'd already swollen up enough he could hardly see out of it. Kaczinski was on top of him flopping around like a fish when you pulled it out of the water on a hook, but his dick was freaking inside Dean, moving. Swelling. Kaczinski was popping his knot. 

It still slid in and out easily for a little while, but then it got too damn big and it wouldn't go. It pushed against the lips of Dean's pussy. Then Kaczinski started thrusting really hard and it felt like he was punching Dean in the pussy. Finally, something gave way and it was inside him. It burned. The pain was so bad Dean could feel himself start to pass out again, but he clawed his way to full consciousness again. He wasn't going to go down. He might not be able to fight, but he wasn't going down. Kaczinski bellowed and stiffened. Dean felt something hot and wet inside him. It started dripping down immediately. Dean wished for his Dad again, so hard that it was like a pain.

Another one of the boys said, "My turn now," and started poking Kaczinski in the shoulder. 

"Gimme a minute, Brian," Kaczinski said. "Just want to see if he ties up with me."

"No, God, no," Dean stammered. Only compatible mates tied together. Everyone knew that much. There was no way Kaczinski could be his mate. 

"Think you're too good to tie with me?" Kaczinski asked and he struck Dean again, another punch to Dean's face, obviously as hard as he could and Dean could feel his cheek start to swell up instantly where he'd been hit. "You're nothing but a hole to me, bitch."

A moment later, the football player slid out of him, knot still inflated. Without Dean's arousal to lock the knot in place, they couldn't tie together. Didn't mean it didn't hurt like hell to have the fist sized knot pull out of him. The one called Brian climbed on top of Dean and pushed his way into Dean's body. Small mercies, his knot was smaller than Kaczinski's, so when it grew, it just kind of slid right into Dean's body. 

Dean's attention drifted after that point. He was aware there were bodies on top of his, that they changed sometimes. He lost count after about the seventh. Once, there was the squeal of a door opening and heavy foot steps walking into the room. Then an older, deeper voice, some big Alpha, a teacher or a coach, asked, "What're you boys doing?" 

There was a pause and Dean dared to hope that there would be adult intervention, that he'd be saved, then the voice said, "Ah, just a little pre-celebration. Don't tire yourselves out, boys. Important game tonight. Y'all better be done with your little whore by warm up time at four-thirty."

Then the coach walked away, chuckling to himself. Dean yelled, "Help me!" but before he could get much further a hand was clapped over his mouth. 

"Help you out with your heat?" one of them asked. "That's what we're doing, bitch. Look at how greedy your hole is. It won't be happy with just one knot."

A huge Alpha, at least two hundred and fifty pounds, one of the defensive players, was pounding Dean at the moment. His growing knot was sliding into and out of Dean and that didn't hurt too bad. Dean was pretty loose and slick with come by now. The football player was smiling, his eyes distant and unfocused, obviously his attention was on something else. He seemed like he might be a nice guy, in another set of circumstances. "Please, stop," Dean whispered to him. "Don't do this to me."

The guy didn't react, didn't seem to acknowledge that he'd heard Dean and that's when it occurred to Dean. To most of these guys, he wasn't a real person. He was just a warm and wet hole that smelled good. Maybe he might have a set of inconvenient limbs attached, but he wasn't any more worthy of talking to than a sex toy. Only Kaczinski seemed to see him as a person and that was almost worse, because Kaczinski's every action and word was driven by malice. 

Things grew fuzzy again. Dean kind of...checked out, but he snapped to attention the minute something fleshy, hot and thick was shoved between his lips. Some one's dick was being crammed into his mouth, down his throat. Dean started gagging, thrashing around, hardly able to breathe. The dick had been shoved down so deep, so suddenly that Dean's nose was buried in pubes, foul, sweaty smelling pubes. Dean bit down, hard, with every erg of force he could apply and he was answered with a bellow of pain and the bright, coppery taste of blood, a lot of it. The dick was yanked from his mouth and things were better, much, much better, but just for a second. He didn't have time to move his head, avoid the blow. He took it dead on the center of his left jaw and pain blossomed instantly, as bright and loud as fireworks, searing like fire and it didn't get better. Dean's jaw felt funny when he tried to move his mouth and he was pretty sure his jaw had been broken or maybe dislocated. It was just agony to move it and he screamed as one of the other football players moved in, grabbed Dean by the chin and tried to force his mouth open to shove a dick in it. It felt, honest to God, like someone was trying to tear his jaw off his face. 

The guy let go of Dean's face and said, "God damn it, Mike. I think you broke his jaw or something. His mouth ain't going to be any use to us. You always take things too damn far, asshat!" 

"The little bitch tried to bite my dick off!" Mike countered. "It's still bleeding."

Well, fuck, Dean hadn't even wounded the guy's dick badly enough to send him to the nurse's office or whatever. The guy fucking his pussy hadn't even stopped. It hadn't been enough to knock him off his stroke. In fact, he sped up, pounding in harder and harder until he was swelling, popping his knot and forcing it into Dean's cunt. This one must have been huge because it wasn't going in like the others. It felt like Kaczinski's had- like he was being punched in the pussy again and again, then it felt like something was splitting. Like he was being split in half, and it went in, but it burned with pain like that time he'd gotten a bullet graze on a hunt. The guy came with huge grunt, like he was some kind of animal. A few minutes later, when the other guys were pulling the guy off, Dean saw that his huge cock was coated with blood. 

Dean wondered what time it was, how long had these guys had him in their power. If he could just make it to four thirty, the deadline imposed by their coach, he'd be okay. He tried to focus, tried to look for a clock or something. Someone's watch. He noticed that the group of Alphas wasn't exactly the same group that had first captured him. Some of them were younger, not quite so huge. But there was always at least four guys on him, one for each limb, plus the guy fucking him. Escape simply wasn't possible but he could survive. He could make it until four thirty. 

Not long after, there was another set of heavy, adult foot steps. Dean didn't dare hope this time that it someone who'd break up this little party. That way, Dean wasn't disappointed when the man, another football coach probably, just walked over, took a look at the group of boys raping Dean, and said, "Coach Petersen said you boys had a little whore in heat in here. You making sure he's having a good time? Getting the full treatment?"

He didn't wait for their answer, just turned away and said as he was walking away, "Warm up starts at four-thirty whether you're balls deep in him or not. I remember what it was like, popping a knot five, six, seven times a day, but an Omega, no matter how sweetly and submissive their pussy, is no excuse for missing warm up."

Jesus. Was the man blind? Did he just look at Dean and not see that Dean's face was swollen beyond recognition? Did he not notice that the 'little whore' had to be held down by five strong football players to be 'sweetly submissive.'?

 

***

High school always let out at three, and Sam's school let out at two-thirty, but they let him hang out in the school library until three. Sam could get a big chunk of his homework done in that time. Then you added in the five minute leisurely stroll from the high school to Sam's school, so the fact that it was three-ten and there was no sign of Dean was worrying, but not as worrying as it could be. Sam headed to the high school. No one noticed the small sixth-grader as he slipped through the big main doors at the front of the high school and headed right to the office. Mrs. Kowalski, one of the school secretaries, noticed him right away though. She was always nice when she didn't have to be and let Sam wait for Dean in the school office for Dean when Dean couldn't leave school at three.

"How are you today, Sam?" she asked. 

"'m fine. Is Dean in detention again, Ma'am?"

The older woman put on the reading glasses that hung on a cord around her neck and consulted a list on a clipboard she kept on her desk. "No, I don't see Dean on the list."

She frowned a moment, then she consulted another clipboard, flipping through the pages rapidly. "I do have him as an unexcused absence for all of his afternoon classes though. Maybe he wasn't feeling well and went home without stopping at the nurse's office."

For a moment, Sam was prepared to believe that. To think that if he went home, he'd find Dean there, cramped up and miserable because of his heat, but there and not in trouble. A woman, a gym teacher, from her outfit of track pants and sport shirt, wearing silvery running shoes, looked up and asked, "Dean? Dean Winchester? Is he alright?"

"I don't know. I think something's wrong," Sam admitted. He was worried. Very worried. It'd been obvious to Sam that Dean was going into heat this morning. The scent was unmistakeable and kind of gross, or at least to Sam, but then Sam was still just a kid. He wondered if he could tell these two women that though, that his brother had insisted on going to school even though he was in heat. He could say this, though, "Dean would never just not pick me up. Not without being in detention. Even then he finds a way to get a message to me normally. He wouldn't go home without me, even if he was really sick. I think something's the matter with him. I think he was in heat and he didn't know it."

Sam blushed for a moment. You didn't just say things like that. The gym teacher whispered something at Mrs. Kowalski and then they both stepped away from the desk, into the supply closet. They shut the door so that Sam couldn't hear what they were saying to each other. Sam strained his ears trying to hear their hushed whispers. He might have just been a kid, but that didn't stop him from quietly freaking out, from feeling like his whole world was shifting under his feet, as he thought about all the things that could happen to an Omega in heat without a mate. 

Sam knew. He might have missed just as much school as Dean and had gotten just as patchy a sex education as Dean, but Sam knew enough to know what he was missing, so he'd done the obvious thing and found a couple of books about heats, Alphas and Omegas and educated himself. It was pretty likely that Sam wouldn't be Omega. He was a second son, not an oldest. He'd probably be Alpha. That was how it usually went. There were exceptions, all the time, but Sam had a sixty-five percent chance of being Alpha. And Dean had had a seventy-five percent change turning into Omega. He didn't beat the odds. It wasn't a bad thing, being Omega, but it was harder. More dangerous unless you had the protection of an Alpha.

Mostly though, Sam was furious at his father, for the usual stuff, yeah, but mostly for not being here today. Dad had seemed to be doing a pretty good job ignoring the fact that Dean was turning Omega, but if he'd been there this morning, there'd have been no question about Dean insisting on going to school. As a widowed man, Dad should have claimed Dean for his own, on the first signs that he was turning Omega. As a father, he should have been the one to help Dean through his first heat, brought him through it gently. But even if he wasn't going to do that, Dad would have put his foot down. Wouldn't have let Dean go to school this morning. Dean should have had the protection of his Alpha father. Instead, Dad was off in another state, hunting something. Yeah, he was saving people, but Dean probably needed saving right now even more than those strangers.

Fretting and stomping back and forth in the office while the grownups were still whispering in the supply closet, Sam almost ran right into an older Alpha, a gym teacher from the looks of him. He wore those track pants with the stripes down the side and a gray cotton sweatshirt over his regular shirt. 

"You must be Dean Winchester's brother," the Alpha said, taking off his glasses for a moment. "The resemblance is remarkable."

"Do you know Dean? Have you seen him?" Sam demanded. 

"Not since first period. He's in my homeroom," the Alpha said, then paused. "He didn't go home? He wasn't...feeling well."

"You knew he was in heat and you didn't make him go home?" Sam wanted to pound on the Alpha. Maybe Sam wasn't an Alpha for real yet, but he felt just as protective as if he was. 

"Easy, kiddo," the Alpha said. "Your brother said he was fine, I can't make him go home if he didn't want to. Where's your father? Why didn't he make Dean stay home today."

"On business. Working."

Sam hated the look of pity and concern the Alpha gave him. It was another thing he added to his tally of things that were his father's fault. Sam would have said something, but the two women walked out of the supply closet at that point and the Alpha addressed himself to them. 

"Did Dean Winchester sign himself out of school early today, Bernice?" 

"That's just what we were talking about, Mike," Mrs. Kowalski said. "The last teacher to have seen him seems to be Janie, just at eleven or so, when he went into the locker room to shower after her gym class. I was about to call Hank and see if he saw anything in the locker room."

"No good. Hank won't be around. He hauls ass home as soon as the last kids toss him their towels," the Alpha said. "I'll go and check out the locker room."

Then a Beta male in a suit escorted an embarrassed looking boy and his parents out of his office inside main school office. Sam knew him. Dean had talked about him before, had been in office in trouble more than once already and they hadn't even been at this school near a full semester yet. Mr. Benson, the vice-principle. The man might have been Beta, but he had an eye for trouble and was used to people obeying him, unlike most Betas. 

"What's going on here?" he asked, once his previous troublemaker and his parents were gone from the office. 

"We're worried about Dean Winchester," Mrs. Kowalski said. "He seems to have disappeared. He's supposed to walk his brother Sam home after school and he wouldn't just skip out. Dean's not like that, regardless of his other disciplinary problems. He was last seen going into the locker room after gym class, when he should have have been...sent home."

There was a peculiar quirk of her voice as she said that. Sam was getting used to it. People around here didn't seem to be able to say 'went into heat' or at least not without extreme embarrassment. The Beta vice-principle seemed to have understood what she meant. Some unspoken communication passed between the four adults, something Sam didn't understand, but could feel from the intensity of their looks was important. 

"You don't think, again, do you, Gordon?" the Alpha named Mike asked Mr. Benson.

***

That was exactly what Janie had feared from the moment that Dean had walked into the locker room. Last year, Toby Smith, a freshman, had gone to a party after the football game and ended up hospitalized. There was a lot of talk about what happened at that party. A lot of talk. There'd been accusations of multiple rapes by members of the football team but no charges had been made. There'd been a lot of talk and there'd been newspaper stories and even a couple of small features in national news magazines about how the local authorities and school officials were helping cover up a crime. In the end, it had all blown over, no one punished, the Smith family moving out of state, because the prosecutor refused to prosecute the case. The school couldn't do anything, because you couldn't very well kick kids out of school or even just off the sports team for unsubstantiated accusations. Unfortunately, they'd had to remain accusations. Despite the fact that she'd seen pictures of Toby afterwards, despite the fact that the county prosecutor was a big football booster and he really should have recused himself, the boys on the football team were innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

That didn't mean she trusted them further than she could throw them. She cursed the bad fortune that sent Tiffany Sanderson falling down the gym bleachers, breaking her wrist and distracting Janie from thinking about Dean, seeing that he made it out of that locker room okay. She feared that Dean had become just another in a long string of Omegas who'd had the misfortune of coming to the attention of the football team. Not that boys came forward very often to name their assailants, but every year, you heard talk of some Omega or another who'd been shared round by the team. 

Gordon, Mike and Bernice were thinking the same thing. 

"Mike, you and me, we're going to check out the football team's lockers, just to be on the safe side," Gordon said. "There's no need to get excited yet. It is still possible he went home. Have you called his home number yet, Bernice?"

***

Sam followed Mr. Benson and Mr. Federer out of the office and down to the sport center area of the school. He was being purposefully quiet, but even so, they should have noticed him before they were nearly there, right at the entrance to the football team's locker room. 

"What are you doing here..." Mr. Benson asked.

"Sam," he supplied. "Dean is my brother. My Omega brother."

He put extra emphasis on Omega, reminding them that if Dean was Omega, then it was almost a sure thing that Sam would be Alpha. Because if Dad wasn't going to be here, doing right by Dean, then the other, at least potential, Alpha in the family would be. It was his responsibility.

The Beta vice-principle didn't seem to get it, but the Alpha did. He was the one who said, "You should stay by the door. If something has happened to your brother, we're going to need someone to run to the nearest phone and call 911. We'll need you to remain calm, so you can contact your father and let the emergency responders know if there are any allergies Dean has. Being the one responsible for an Omega isn't always rushing in and pounding any Alpha who dares touch him. You understand?"

Sam nodded and said, "Yeah."

He hadn't actually expected that they'd let him go in, he knew he was just a kid and a scrawny, short one at that, but he'd had to make it clear that he would do anything for Dean. That Dean wasn't entirely unprotected. 

***

Dean endured. It was his only option at this point. 

Then suddenly, there was a lot of shouting, most of it coming from his rapists. The one on top of him wasn't any more and his limbs were free. The instant he was free, he rolled off the bench and he found his feet and he ran, not caring that he didn't have any clothes, not caring where he was going, not caring that his legs were doing a piss poor job supporting him, so he swerved and swayed. He bashed himself into a bank of lockers more than once in the twenty or so feet he managed before his legs gave out entirely. He tried, oh, he tried so hard to get to his feet again, but he couldn't. So he crawled. Anything to get out of here. 

When the older Alpha tried to stop him from his crawl, Dean recoiled automatically from the smell of Alpha and cried out his dismay, certain that the crowd of younger Alphas had been dispersed just so that some older, stronger ones could have their turn. Instead, he was left alone for a few moments, then there was Sam right there, pulling him onto his small lap.

"Sammy! Ge' oudda here," Dean wailed. Sammy couldn't be here. There was no way Dean could protect Sammy from those guys who had gotten him. "Dangerous! Hur' you too."

"It's okay, Dean," Sammy said. "Mr. Benson and Mr. Federer are taking care of those guys. The cops are coming. You're safe now. I gotcha. You're safe. You just gotta hold still until the ambulance gets here."

"No!"

"I know we're not supposed to go to the hospital," Sammy said. "But you're really hurt, Dean. You're bleeding. Don't talk. Your jaw looks funny. I think they broke it."

Someone had draped a couple of towels over Dean's most private parts while Sam was talking. Dean let himself space out a little, trusting Sammy when he said that they were safe. It just hurt too bad to really pay attention to anything but how much it hurt. His jaw, especially since Sam had called attention to it, was a star burst of pain, probably the worst of it, but his eye was throbbing and he couldn't see out of it. Before long, there was a couple of guys in blue uniforms, trying to talk to him, touching him gently, here and there. Sammy wasn't far away, Dean could still hear him, but they wouldn't let Sammy hold him any more. When they realized that Dean wasn't communicative, they eventually loaded him onto a gurney, strapped him on and when that started to freak him out, being held down again, they injected him with something and a short moment later, everything was black. 

 

***

Sam watched the EMTs sedate his brother after he'd started to freak out, limbs flailing and hysterical screaming. He wanted to ride with his brother to the hospital in the ambulance but they wouldn't let him. He could have kept Dean calm, he was sure of it, without having to resorting to drugging him to the gills, though maybe it was for the best. He wouldn't be feeling pain if he was knocked out, would he? Dean needed that. They'd pounded his face into hamburger. There'd been deep bruises up and down his abdomen, all up and down his arms and legs. Dean had been bleeding from down there. Lots. Like puddles of bright ruby forming on the floor underneath him. 

All around the locker room was chaos. There were cops but they were arguing with Mr. Benson and Mr. Federer about who should be arrested. There were three more coach types in the room now too, adding their noise to the brouhaha. The big guy who'd been flopping up and down on top of Dean when Sam had entered the locker room was already in cuffs and being led away, but all the other guys who'd been in the room were just standing around. They'd even been allowed to get dressed and that made Sam burn with anger. If he could have made each of the burst into flames with his mind, he would have. Dean wasn't being allowed to get dressed, other than an afterthought blanket once they'd got him on the gurney. 

At least Sam heard Mr. Benson say, as he left the locker room, following the gurney out to the ambulance, "Every single person present in this room when I walked in and anyone I can substantiate as having been in this room in the past three hours is suspended, pending further investigation and possible expulsion. Do I make myself clear? Starting immediately. That includes all extracurricular activities, meaning the game tonight."

There was a huge roar of protest. It riled Sam even further. As if they could think about playing their stupid game when his brother was bleeding out from his freaking pussy, caused by these jerks. Alpha knot-heads. It was almost enough to make Sam want to not be an Alpha. He was next to a glass trophy case in the hallway as he watched them load his brother's gurney into the ambulance. He punched it and in a perfect world, the glass would have shattered into a million pieces. It was reality though and the trophy case was thick, tempered glass and he was twelve. It just hurt really bad and he shook his fist, hoping he hadn't hurt himself too. 

A soft hand was laid on his shoulder and he looked up. It was Miss LaDouce, the gym teacher and Mrs. Kowalski standing next to her. 

"Have you called your father yet?" she asked.

"No, Ma'am," he said. She was being so nice, the both of them really, and he just wanted to bury his face into something, maybe into one of their mid sections, and just cry. But he couldn't. He had to be as strong an Alpha as he could for Dean. 

"Don't worry about it," Mrs. Kowalski said. "I'll call. It's better he hear this from the school than you."

"No, I need to call him," Sam insisted. "He won't talk to you."

***

John Winchester pulled the phone out of his pocket and answered it. Normally he'd just let it go to voice mail if it rang while he was driving, but this was a long, empty straight stretch and one of the few places where this state highway expanded to a dual lane divided road. He'd crossed the Mississippi a while ago, Iowa left behind him and he hoped to be home, or rather back to the place he'd left his boys, before dinner tonight. The caller id showed the number- the area code of their temporary home, but not a number he recognized.

"This is John Winchester," he said.

"Dad! You gotta come home now! Dean's hurt. Hurt so bad," said the voice on the other end of the line. Sam, his voice quavery, with fear and as if he were about to cry. 

John pulled over to the side of the road. It was bad if Sam was about to cry. His brave, probably going to be an Alpha little boy didn't just splutter all over the place like he was now. He was going on about ambulances, the football team, bleeding out and broken jaws. In a way, he wished it had been Sam that had been hurt and Dean he was talking with now. Even at Dean's most emotional, he could just snap "report' at the boy and he'd get a cogent story. Sam took different tactics to manage at difficult moments. 

"Hold on, Sam," John said. "Are you safe at this moment?"

'Yeah, but Dean was bleeding so much. I don't know if he's going to make it. They hurt him so bad."

John knew that if he didn't cut Sam off, he'd just go on and on. Work himself into a frenzy. "He's gone to the hospital in an ambulance?"

"A few minutes ago. The EMTs..." 

"Where did they take Dean?"

Sam stammered out the name of the hospital in the town they'd been staying. 

"Where did Dean get hurt?"

"School. In the locker room. He didn't pick me up after school and I came looking for him and..."

"Easy sport. Is there some adult there I can talk to? Someone in charge."

"Yeah." 

Sam had sounded relieved and the phone was put down. John could hear some discussion in the room, muffled but urgent sounding, between a man and a woman. He couldn't make out a single word, but the conversation was being conducted at a rapid clip and high volume. Eventually, a man's voice came on the phone line, "This is Gordon Benson. I'm a vice-principal at your son's high school."

"What's going on? Sam says Dean was badly hurt at your school. I need answers." 

John put on his most demanding voice, didn't hesitate to use every bit of the commanding Alpha undertones he usually kept rein on. But the vice-principal must have been used to standing his ground, plus they were less effective over the phone. He just simply said. "Your son has been taken to the hospital. We have no word yet on his condition. There was an incident with several students. Beyond that, I'm not at liberty to say, but there is an active police investigation into the matter."

John mulled this over. Active police investigation? The last thing he wanted was police looking into his family's business. Dean was the one who was hurt, from the sound of it, or at least the one hurt badly enough to get hauled away in an ambulance. His boy wasn't weak, not in the slightest. If it'd been a fair fight, even against a much bigger boy, Dean would have the advantage, by far. But Sam had said football team, not football player. Had a group of much bigger boys ganged up on Dean? He tried to imagine a situation where it might happen. Dean could act purposefully stupid sometimes, but he wasn't dumb. He wouldn't antagonize a whole group of much bigger boys, would he? Well, if he did, he'd have some good reason for it. 

He had to say something to this vice-principal now. "I had to travel for work today. I left before dawn this morning. I'm about three hours out from town now. I'll go right to the hospital and I expect to find someone there who can explain to me just how it is that my son was hurt badly enough under your school's care that he had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance."

"Mr. Winchester, I understand your son's school attendance has been...patchy. That he might have missed some crucial part of his education."

"You're using now to bring up his academic problems?!"

Dean wasn't dumb despite the fact that he'd been held back a few times. Probably he was smarter than his academically gifted little brother. It was just that Dean felt he had more important things to focus on than school and John, to his shame, had never disabused him of this notion, and if Dean wanted a pressure valve, a way to rebel against authority, John had never cared about that either. Dean was absolutely obedient to the only authority that mattered to John- himself. 

"I'm not speaking of academics so much as. Well, have you spoken to your son about sexuality?"

"What?"

"Mr. Winchester, the assault on your son was sexual in nature. Your son is in heat, and he doesn't appear to have been aware of the fact. He should have been kept home from school today."

John let this sink in. Assault. Sexual nature. Dean hadn't just been beaten so badly he'd been taken to the hospital. He'd been raped. He'd been in heat? That meant, for sure, that Dean was Omega. John had been vaguely aware that something was happening with Dean. He'd smelled different. Not bad, on the contrary, it was a very appealing smell. He'd been spending more time in the bathroom, more time staring at himself in mirrors. John hadn't wanted to deal with it, wasn't ready to claim his son as would be expected of him, so he'd ignored it, pretending it would go away if he didn't talk about it. It'd been classic Winchester avoidance, which worked extremely well, until it didn't any more. 

"Let me get this right. My son shows up at school in heat, and instead of anyone acting to protect him, you allow him to be raped by the football team? On school property. You've got a hell of a lot to answer for, Benson." 

John hung up. He nearly threw the phone out the window in anger but stopped himself. Sam might need to call again. Or the hospital might call. He threw the phone on the other seat and drove.

John drove like he did anything, with a single-minded intensity fueled by fury, pushing the envelope of what he thought he could get away with. He turned off the state highway onto a long, straight county road he knew about, not exactly a short cut, but it was a straight line through the corn and soy bean country of this long, flat stretch of Illinois. He'd avoid the cops that liked to lurk along the state highway, looking for their next ticket to meet their quota. He could push the Impala, ask her to give him everything she had. The only danger was if he were to suddenly come across slow moving farm equipment on the road, but the road stretched level to the horizon, no obstructions to the view. He'd see something long before he'd need to avoid it. He pushed all conscious thought from his mind and focused on driving as fast as he dared to push the Impala.

Working his way from county road to road, he pulled into the nowhere little town he'd left his sons about half a hour ahead of schedule. There was a sign posted next to the city limits sign- "home to the Spartans- State AAA High School Football Champions" and it gave years. About once every five or so years, the town had a championship team. Those boys could probably get away with murder, especially if they were winning this year. A town like this didn't have a lot going for it, other than the football team. The boys would be heroes and John was not sanguine about the chances of getting a conviction from a judge for one of these football players raping an in heat Omega. Dean would be the one blamed. Vilified. 

They'd probably say they couldn't help themselves because of his heat, which was only so much bullshit. Any Alpha who said he couldn't stop himself even in the face of an Omega's heat wasn't much of an Alpha in John Winchester's eyes. Yes, it took discipline and will, you had to make yourself walk away, but it could be done. Not easily, but then when had the easy thing been worth doing? And didn't an Omega deserve the same respect you'd grant anyone else- to take care of them in their time of weakness, to not press an advantage you had over them. 

He parked in the hospital out lot, but not far away from what looked like a fire exit, just in case they needed to be gone from the hospital quickly. As he stood up, feeling the final heat of the day on his face, he realized he'd moved beyond the shaking, nervous anger of earlier to a cold, hard fury. 

It was easy enough to find the emergency room. He was well familiar with them. All too familiar. He stepped up to the desk and said, "I'm looking for Dean Winchester. He was brought here earlier. I'm his father."

The nurse at the intake desk looked him up and down. She was a pretty, little Beta, sort of reminded him of Mary in a vague way. She clicked at her computer, frowned a little at what she saw, then pushed a clipboard full of forms at him- the standard packet you filled out for an emergency room visit. He felt overwhelmed for a moment- the name on the insurance card in his wallet did not come even close to matching Winchester and he had the kids registered in school under their real name. Dean would have been brought in under his real name. 

"I'll need you to fill out these," she said.

Then suddenly Sam called out, "Dad!" from behind him. A couple of seconds later, before John could fully turn around, Sam had launched himself at John and had his arms around John's waist, his face in John's side.

"Hey, kiddo," he said. "Any word on Dean."

"They won't tell me anything," Sam complained. "They won't let me see him."

"We'll get answers soon," John promised, then drew Sam over to the banks of chairs in the waiting area. Even before he said down, two women approached them. One was middle-aged, with a generous girth to her, the sort of woman who wore her reading glasses on a chair around her neck and a much younger, much skinnier woman, the sort of woman who looked like she never wore anything but gym clothes, not necessarily a lesbian, but a woman who didn't care that she looked like one. She was also on verge of losing it. The bigger, older woman seemed worried, concerned. This woman was doing a good job of covering it up, but John knew freak out when he saw it. 

"Dad, this is Miss LaDouce, Dean's gym teacher," Sam said. "And Mrs. Kowalski. They were sitting with me until you got here."

"We'd better get going," Mrs. Kowalski said. "I'm sure you'll want your son to yourself. He's a brave and capable young man. You should be proud of him."

"Wait!" he said as they turned to go. "What happened? How did this happen?"

Kowalski frowned and said, "I'm sorry, but we've all been advised by the school district attorney not to speak about the matter to anyone, especially not you, and the superintendent has made it clear he expects this to be taken as a rule and not advice. I would, but." 

"I understand. I won't be the cause of you losing your job," he said, silently cursing the cover your ass attitude of the school district, like like every small town school district everywhere. They were circling up the wagon train, closing it off from attack by outsiders. It didn't matter though. He'd get his answers. From Sam. From Dean when he was able. 

It also didn't matter because regardless of who'd helped cause the damage along the way, the base cause, the start of it could only be laid at his own feet. If he'd paid attention, if he'd been there this morning when the boys were getting ready to go to school, there wouldn't have been any question of Dean going any further than the motel room door, and assuming Dean would have been agreeable, probably no further than John's bed. Even if he wasn't going to claim the boy, a father should be aware when his son was going into heat, before it happened, and done everything possible to protect him during it. 

John watched the two teachers walk away and he turned to the clip board, rapidly filling it, thanking the powers that be that Dean hadn't inherited Mary's allergies to both sulfa drugs and aspirin. Sam, sitting beside him, seemed itching to start something and he began, "Dad..."

"You're right, Sam. I should have been here," John admitted, just holding the clip board loosely in his hands for the moment. "I should have known he was going into heat."

John thought that he actually had known. He'd just not wanted Dean to stop being his little boy. He hadn't thought he was ready to take the steps that he was going to take. It was a big step, going from father to mate. 

"How bad was it?" He asked Sam.

"It was bad. He was bleeding a lot. From down there," Sam said.

John winced. How brutal they must have been to make an Omega bleed. An Omega who was in heat and should have been leaking slick all over the place. What kind of Alpha got his rocks off on hurt and pain like that?

"I think they broke his jaw," Sam continued. "It was all swollen up and funny looking."

John pushed down the guilt and the anger and got back to filling out forms, but before he finished, a woman in a white lab coat worn over green scrubs approached him. "You're Dean Winchester's father?" she asked. He nodded. She said, "I'm Doctor Kara Ripley. Come with me. I treated your son in the emergency room."

He followed her to a small, cramped office and he took the seat she offered him on the other side of the desk. "Your son is out of the first surgery he'll need," she said. "Normally we'd wait for parental permission before surgery, but he was going to die from blood loss unless we stopped it. We stitched up several severe internal and external lacerations in his vagina and of his vulva. It looks like they just punched their knots into him without making sure he was ready for them."

John forced the anger down. It wouldn't do any good here, certainly not used against this well meaning doctor. He could picture the fist-sized knots being forced into Dean's young body again and again, tearing him apart and it made him want to kill someone.  
But he pushed it down. Getting angry almost always made you dumb.

"The first surgery?" John asked, wondering just how bad this had gotten.

"We're going to need to surgically repair his orbital bone. He has what they call a 'blow out' fracture and there's entrapment of the extra-ocular muscles. They also broke his jaw. He'll have to have it wired shut for four to six weeks."

Well, that one they could handle, John thought, thinking of how he'd been sidelined for that reason, after a spirit he was in the process of salting and burning had thrown him into a granite headstone. His jaw had been fractured and it had been nothing but protein shakes and peanut butter and banana smoothies for weeks. A broken jaw wasn't pleasant, but it was manageable. But when you added in all the other wounds Dean had suffered and not just of his body, it would no doubt be a challenge. 

The doctor was still talking to him, he realized. 

"Assuming the surgery goes well, there shouldn't be any impairment of vision in that eye. We'd be keeping him here for a few days either way. He's also been given a severe concussion. We'll need to monitor him for signs of intracranial swelling as well as internal bleeding. He has a couple of broken ribs and his abdominal area is a mass of deep bruising. I'd say, unlike the others, he went down fighting."

"What do you mean, others?"

The doctor wouldn't look him in the eye. She sighed though and looked down as she said, "I'd say I do a rape kit on an Omega about once a month, which would be nothing in a big city hospital, but here in a town this small, it amounts to an epidemic and the prosecutor hasn't prosecuted a rape charge in years. That's just the ones that felt it was bad enough to come to the hospital. I can't imagine how many there are who don't feel they can come forward for help. There's a real atmosphere here. Things most people would think of as rape are just considered to be acceptable here. Look, if you care about your son, get him claimed by someone or get him out of here. Or both. Your son isn't the first Omega raped by the football team, not even the first this year. The boys that did this aren't getting locked up and they'll see him as fair game from now on. Their property."

He couldn't stop the low growling that came from him at the thought of other Alphas, other men thinking his boy was their property. Maybe he hadn't claimed the boy yet but there was no doubt in his mind that Dean belonged with him. To him. Dean was his and, more importantly, he was Dean's.

"Easy there," the doctor said. 

"Can I see him? I need to see him," John said. 

"Not yet," she said. "He's in the recovery unit. We'll move him up to a room and then evaluate when he'll be ready for the surgery to repair his jaw and orbital socket. You should be able to see him once he's settled in his room."

So he ended up back in the waiting room, Sam at his side. After a while, he said, "I know you were wanting to stay in one place for a while for school. But we have to move on as soon as Dean is out of the hospital."

"I wouldn't want to stay. They nearly killed him, Dad," Sam said, bitterly. "He was bleeding and everyone was more worried about if the football players could play their stupid game tonight. I saw. There were four of them holding him down and one of them on top of him. Is that what Alphas are like? Because I don't want to be Alpha."

"That's one way to be an Alpha," John said. "But it's not the right way. In fact, it's a crapsack way. I hope you were raised better than that."

Neither of them said what they both knew to be true- that Sam had been raised by Dean more than John. Also, that despite Dean's tough exterior and his ready embrace of training for the hunt, that deep down, Dean was as gentle a soul as they came. John had no doubt that Dean had raised Sam was well as it was possible for a child to raise another child only four years younger than himself and he had no doubt that he would make a wonderful parent to the children that would no doubt soon be entering their lives, now that Dean had started getting heats. 

Then John had a chilling thought. Those animals had been with Dean in heat for hours. He wasn't clear on exactly how many, but people had mentioned the football team, as if all of them were involved. Dean could well have conceived during his rape. His son, his beautiful Omega son did not deserve to be permanently affected by this. Only the name of this hospital was St. Joseph's Regional. It was part of the Resurrection network of hospitals. It was, without a doubt, a Catholic hospital. John went up to the desk again and he asked the nurse, as politely as he could, to ask Dean's doctor to come talk with him again. He went back to wait with Sam again and after what seemed like hours, the doctor still didn't arrive, but the police did. Two uniforms- one old guy with a bristly gray crew cut, one younger guy with a thick shock of blond hair. The young guy looked bored and angry. He was pissed off because he had to be here doing this. The old guy looked tired, but there was a warmth to his eyes that spoke of a deep seated kindness that the years couldn't burn out of him. 

"Mr. Winchester, if you could come with us," the younger cop said. "We need to take your son's statement and since he's a minor, we can't talk to him without you present."

"You're taking his statement? According to the doctor he just got out of surgery. It can wait," John said, using his best commanding tone. It didn't matter. They wouldn't be waiting around long enough for any kind of court case to commence, much less complete. He was thinking about leaving the state just as soon as they could get Dean out of here, literally, not even stopping back at their current digs. Nothing they'd left there was irreplaceable. 

"We've got a dozen high school boys downtown right now because some Omega chose to wander around the school showers in full blown heat," the cop said, his voice bitter, full of bile. 

It took John a good full minute to get himself under control enough before he would let himself speak. He kept reminding himself that getting angry, letting your fury control you made you stupid. The last thing Dean needed right now was a father cooling his heels in jail for assaulting an officer. As satisfying as it would have been to throw a right hook and ring the bell of that asshole younger cop, he wasn't going to do it. It wasn't that John wasn't going to get what Dean deserved. John was going to fight for his son, but he was going to do it smart. 

"Do you always talk to the families of the victims this way? I've got a son with broken bones and lacerations so bad he required surgery not to bleed to death," John said. "A son facing at least one more surgery, so I think it can wait until at least tomorrow."

"C'mon, Mike," the older cop said. "We can talk to the kid later. I seen the kid. They made hamburger out of his face. I'm not sure he even can talk right now."

"No, we're getting a statement now," Mike said. "Those boys are accused of rape and we're getting this sorted out now."

"You play football, Mike?" John asked. "Maybe on the high school team?"

"I don't see what that has to do with anything," Mike said. 

The older cop answered though, "Mike there was the starting quarterback on the team that won state back in eighty-six."

Well, that explained part of why he was being such an ass- loyalty, if not to an actual team, then to the memory of one. That was why he sounded like he was far more concerned with getting the team members off charges than getting the truth or protecting the actual victim. People were such a morass of conflicting motivations. John was not a fan of the cops, hadn't been even before he'd started hunting, before that had brought him into close proximity to them more often than he'd like. 

John was saved from applying some choice words to this former football hero with the arrival of the doctor he'd spoken to earlier. She rounded on the cops, drawing herself up to her full height of about five two and she spoke to the cops with not an ounce of doubt that they'd listen to her. And obey. They were in a hospital and she was a doctor. This was her wheelhouse. She was the ultimate authority here. 

"I told you, even if you can get the victim's father in the room, you can't talk to him. He's in no shape to make a statement. Period. Look, you'll get the rape kit. You've taken my statement. That's what you're getting tonight."

"We need..." the young cop started.

The older cop cut him off, "Mike, take a powder."

The younger cop looked surprised, as if the older one never took charge like this, but he was obviously the one of the pair with rank because Mike shut his trap and stalked away. When they were alone, the cop, from his ID, one Dan Michaelson, said to them, "Doctor Ripley, good to see you again."

"Wish I could say likewise, Dan," she said.

"You know, you might want to consider losing that rape kit," he said. "Or parts of it."

"What? What are you talking about?"

"I saw the boy, what they did to him. You and I know that rape of an Omega will never stick, but I'd say things are looking pretty good for aggravated battery."

"But that's..." the doctor said, outraged.

"A much lesser charge. I know. But would you rather have three years that stick or twenty that never happen?"

John could be utterly pragmatic. It wasn't right or just, of course. The young men that had raped his son should be punished for that crime, but he'd settle for them getting time for something. "I agree," John said.

"His facial injuries alone..." Doctor Ripley said, looking a little lost and ill. "They should get punished for that and the rape."

"You know what happened to my family too, Doctor Ripley," Officer Michaelson said. "You know what happened and the fact that it happened to the son of one of their own wasn't enough to get the prosecutor to even send it to grand jury. I want that little bastard Deke Kaczinski behind bars. He's eighteen now. He'll be tried as an adult."

The doctor looked to John again and he didn't have the heart to tell her that by the time any charges came to trial, he had every intention of having Dean be all the way on the other side of the country. He wasn't going to allow them to put his Omega up on the stand, just to have him be torn apart. He wanted justice but what he needed and Dean needed was to protect Dean. But if they were going to charge the boys that had done this with aggravated battery, then pictures and medical testimony ought to be enough. 

"I'm not going to talk about this now," John said, firmly. "I wanted to make sure that Dean was getting emergency contraception."

"It's the policy of this hospital not to prescribe that medication, even in cases of rape, even though it is a drug that is widely accepted as safe and effective in the prevention of pregnancy. Even though it's readily available without prescription at the national chain pharmacy down the street," the doctor said, the traces of bitterness in her voice all but smoothed over. 

"That's," John started. Even though he'd been expecting to hear it, he was stunned to hear it stated so bluntly. They would not give his son the medicine he needed to not become pregnant from this assault.

"John, did you hear me?" the doctor said. "It's readily available without a prescription at the pharmacy down the street. I can't prescribe it, but I don't need to. But his jaw is going to be wired up soon and he'll only be able to take what can be sipped through a straw."

He finally understood what she was trying to tell him. That she couldn't give Dean the morning after pill, but that she was encouraging him to administer it to Dean himself. He had get it together. He had to get Dean taken care of. With a plan, something that needed to happen, he could act. There was something practical, useful he could do. John left her behind, gathered up Sam and made his way to the entrance of the hospital. The police officer followed him. 

"This happened to your Omega too?" John asked the police officer. 

"Not my Omega. He was never mine to claim," Officer Michaelson said. "My baby boy. Timmy was the youngest child of my first Omega."

"Was?" John asked. "Those boys killed him?"

"Not directly," Michaelson said. "I made a mistake. I pushed him to tell what happened. Nothing was done to the perps and it just made Timmy a pariah at school. He found some pills and."

John had talked to many parents over the year who had lost their children. Mostly it had been to some monster or another, but the etching of grief in their voices never got easier to hear, especially when it was a man like this officer- a big, tough Alpha that had it all locked down. Mostly. 

"I'm sorry for your loss," John said. 

"Your boy is your oldest?" Michaelson asked. John nodded. "Yours to claim? Why didn't you? He'd have been safe."

"He was my little boy," John said. "I wasn't ready for him to be my mate yet."

But even that wasn't the full truth. In many ways, John had treated Dean as if they were mated already. Didn't he depend on Dean to take care of Sam? Didn't he rely on the way Dean patched him up and soothed him after a hunt, the way he would say it would be okay after some of the things that John had seen would just wreck him. But John had always thought that there wouldn't be anyone else for him after Mary. She was it. His one love. But was that even true? Her memory seemed so faded by time that he could hardly remember her voice and when he tried to remember her face, the one that came to mind was Dean, with the same eyes and same fiercely loving look in those eyes. 

"Look, I'm not really one to talk, to tell you what to do, but that boy of yours needs your protection more now than ever," Michaelson said. "When a group of Alphas takes an Omega like that, using him without claiming or mating him, it's like they're marking him as used or something. Up for grabs. You don't claim him, this will only be the first attack. Look, I would drop Tommy off for school and pick him up right after, but it happened again and again, during school hours even. He'd deny it, but I could smell it on him and I could smell his pain and there was nothing I could do about it, because he wasn't mine to claim, but you can."

"I'll have to think about it. It's a big step," John said. 

Then he got Sam and they got out of there. He explained where they were going, if only to prevent the inevitable questioning and arguing about where they were going. Even for a kid who was almost certainly going to grow up to be an Alpha, Sam could be stubborn and independent to the point of exhaustion. John just didn't need it at this moment. 

They got to the drug store and discovered that the morning after pill was behind the pharmacy counter. Only to stop it from being shop lifted the cashier said, but the pharmacist wouldn't sell it to him. She was a rosy faced, round little woman with her white lab coat thrown over a floral print dress. She wore a silver cross around her neck, a little Ichthys with a cross pin on her lapel.

"The law is clear," she said. "I'm not required to provide any drugs that I have a moral objection to. These are abortion pills and I have a moral objection to them."

"And I have a moral objection to having your Sunday school crackpot ethics being shoved down my throat when all I want is medicine my son needs."

After several minutes of arguing, he convinced the store manager that just because something was kept behind the pharmacy counter didn't mean a pharmacist was needed to sell it to him, because the medication didn't require a prescription. Once that was cleared up, it took a few minutes to find someone willing to actually be the one to ring him up. He suspected that it wasn't so much that the whole staff was right to life, but that between the pharmacist and the manager, everyone had been intimidated into it. With his unwanted digression into right to life politics, it was well over an hour before he got back to the hospital. Since when did a smattering of cells have a bigger right to life than his precious, nearly fully grown son? This time when he got to the emergency room desk, he was directed up to a room on the second floor- pediatrics, a reminder that Dean, though on the cusp of full maturity, hadn't quite got there yet. 

A uniformed hospital security guard met him at the door to Dean's room, stopped him from entering. "ID please. Family and authorized personnel only," the guard said. He was just a Beta and just a rent-a-cop, really, but he had the very real power to deny John access to Dean, so John dug in his wallet, into a hidden pocket of it, where he kept his real ID, the Kansas drivers license that he'd put some effort into keeping current and keeping clean.

"John Winchester," John said. "I'm Dean's father. What's with the armed guard?"

"Mr. Winchester," the guard said, with a nod that wasn't quite respectful. "It's for your son's protection."

And then John caught a whiff of Dean in the air, seeping out from under the closed hospital room door. It was the sweetest damn thing John had ever scented. It bypassed conscious thought and went right to John's cock which went from completely unnoticed, to nearly fully chubbed up in seconds. Oh, God. Despite everything, despite how hurt he was, despite nearly having been torn to pieces, Dean was still in heat. Part of John wanted to flee, fearing that he wouldn't be able to stop himself, that he would claim and take Dean right there without regard for his injuries. He was afraid his animal side would insist on shoving his knot up into Dean, not caring that he'd tear him apart again. 

A nurse exited the hospital room and pulled the door closed behind her with a quiet click. "You're Dean's father?" she asked, giving him a hard look up and down. She narrowed her eyes at him, judging him, not fairly either. He swallowed hard and nodded. He was a Marine and a hunter. He'd faced down demons, vampires and other things that would send most people screaming into the night but he was more than a little intimidated by this five foot one Philippine nurse. There was something about the way she said Dean. She'd already latched onto Dean with motherly concern and she was like a mini mama bear. Women sometimes did that to his sons, and it didn't seem to be just their motherlessness, but something in Dean especially brought it out. 

"He's been asking for you," she said, letting John know clearly that she thought he didn't deserve to be in the thoughts of such a precious boy. "For over an hour now." The 'where were you?' was implied. 

"I was at the drugstore, getting him emergency contraception," John explained. "Since the hospital won't administer it to him."

She seemed to soften just slightly, like a glacier in the face of a summer day, but it would take a lot more than that to win her over. "I don't think he'll need it," she said. "He's still in heat. Means he hasn't caught yet. But if he were my boy, I'd give it to him anyway, just to be on the safe side. You go on in. I'll let the doctor know you're here. He'll want to speak with you."

"I thought Dr. Ripley was Dean's doctor," John said.

"Now that he's up in peds, his attending physician is Dr. Gregory Booth. He'll be coordinating Dean's care with the orthopedics and surgery departments. I'll let him know you're here. Go on in. Dean wants you."

John reached for the door handle as the nurse turned to Sam and said, "You must be Sammy?"

"Sam," his youngest son said gravely. 

"Dean's been asking about you too. He wants to make sure you're okay. He's a little disoriented, from the medications we're giving him for pain. He seems to think you're in danger or you were hurt too. Maybe you can let him know you're okay and he'll be able to rest better."

"Yes, ma'am," Sam said and for a moment his brave, stoic facade just about broke down and he seemed like he was going to cry. 

John really hated to do this to Sam, but there was Dean to think about. "Son," he said. "Can you be brave a little while longer? Put a good face on? For Dean? He's always watched out for you, right? He needs you to watch out for him right now."

Sam sniffed, then straightened his spine and said, "Yeah, I can."

John wished he had someone to give him a pep talk about needing to be brave for Dean, because what he saw horrified him. He'd seen plenty of the results of mayhem, been at the wrong end of a monster himself, had stitches put into him by Bobby, crude and effective, but he'd never seen anything quite like this. The part of Dean's face that hadn't been swathed in white gauze was swollen out of recognition. And his boy was in full point hospital restraints.

"What the hell is this?" John demanded of the nurse. "Why have you got him tied up?"

"Sir, he's been disoriented and agitated," she said. "He pulled out his IV and assaulted a nurse. We can't sedate him further at this point and he needs to be still. He has broken ribs. He could puncture a lung in his agitation."

"I can calm him down," John said, then looked down at his secret weapon. "We can calm him down, Sam and me."

Sam didn't wait for the nurse to give him permission. He marched right up to the hospital bed and grabbed Dean's hand. "Hey, Jerk," he said.

"S'mmy?" Dean asked. 

"Hey, don't try and talk," Sam said. "You got your jaw broken. I'm okay. You're gonna be okay. Dad's here."

"Ssff?" Dean asked.

"Yeah, I'm safe, Dean. So are you. You gotta calm down, dude," Sam said.

With that, Dean seemed to become aware of his restraints again and he started pulling against them, struggling in them, working against them as hard as he could. Sam's eyes grew big and he turned to the nurse and said, "You gotta take those off him. They were holding him down, one of them on each arm and leg. By the wrists and ankles."

The nurse looked at Dean, horrified. "We didn't know that," she said. "I'm going to find the doctor and see if there's any way at all we can put him into deeper sedation instead."

She hurried out of the room, but John didn't wait. He started unbuckling his son immediately, freeing him. "Dean," he said. "Dean! The threat is over. Stand down, soldier."

Sometimes he ached that he'd trained his son to be such a good little soldier, such a fighter, but at this moment he couldn't have been any more glad of his son's automatic obedience to one of his commands. John yearned to pull his boy into his arms, hold him close and squeeze him tightly, even as he knew that for now at least, Dean probably shouldn't be moved, much less bear hugged. One of Dean's eyes wasn't covered with bandages and he opened it, clearly, for the moment at least, in the here and now.

So John continued, "You're in a hospital. You were hurt badly, but they're taking good care of you. The boys that did this to you are arrested. I need you to hold still and let the doctors and nurses do what they need to do to fix you up. Got that?"

"S'r," Dean said and he held still. "Srry."

It hit him like a blow- Dean was apologizing. He was saying he was sorry for this, as if he were the one to blame. John could feel the acid bile of guilt churning in his stomach, knowing that he was the one responsible for this, not just for not making a move to protect Dean before this happened, but for raising Dean so that the boy felt responsible for things that he couldn't possibly hope to control. He'd never meant that, never meant for Dean to go into heat with no one to take care of him. If he'd been home by this morning, like he should have been, this never would have happened. Even if he didn't mate Dean, he would have kept him home. Or if he'd even just acknowledged that Dean was turning Omega, he could have gotten him heat suppressants. Something. 

"You've got nothing to be sorry for, Dean. This wasn't your fault. Don't try and talk," John said, as tenderly as he could manage, touching one of the few places on Dean that didn't seem to have some bruise or other hurt on it, his upper arm. "The nurse has gone to see if they can give you more medication. And I need you to take these pills for me."

John broke open the small box of emergency contraception and pulled out the first set of pills. He gingerly placed them in Dean's broken mouth, then put a cup of water up to his mouth. Thank God the nurse had thought to put a straw in the cup, so that Dean could suck up a little water without too much problem. He managed, just barely, to get the pills down. Never before had John been so glad that Dean followed orders without question. 

As Sam found another chair and pulled up to the foot of the bed, to touch Dean's feet, also mostly unhurt, John found a chair and stroked the unhurt part of Dean's arm, just taking in the whole catalog of bruising and gauze covered wounds. John pushed down his urge to punch something when he saw the hand shaped bruises on Dean's throat. One of those monsters must have been choking Dean as he raped John's boy. It was something you saw in porn sometimes, which these days, was rougher, harsher than it used to be. Once, those kind of moves were something you only saw in fetish stuff, whereas now, you'd see it in mainstream stuff all the time. John pushed down on his anger, hard. He wanted to punch walls, fight something. Kill something. But for his sons' sakes, he pushed his rage down. Sam, strained and anxious in the chair and Dean, battered and fragile, wouldn't understand that his anger wasn't at them. 

By the time the nurse returned, Dean was asleep. Real sleep, not drugged sleep, though it couldn't have been that restful. He kept jerking, as if on the verge of waking up, but he never actually did. He settled down again as soon as John would touch him. The nurse came with a syringe full of clear fluid. "I've got some more pain reliever. It should help him rest as well."

She shot the drugs into Dean's IV port and Dean did seem to relax, his sleep deepened. Even Sam fell asleep, curled up in the hospital chair. Only John didn't sleep. Dean's doctor came in, talked at John for a while and John could only just nod. They were planning on taking Dean into surgery in the morning to repair the broken bones in his face. It wasn't an emergency. He'd be stronger in the morning, having gotten some rest. 

"Is there anything you can do for his heat? Even with the sedation, he doesn't seem comfortable," John asked. Despite it all, Dean's heat smell persisted, enticing, sweet. John had been at half mast pretty much constantly since walking into the room. Only the fact that Dean was so hurt, so very obviously hurt, had stopped John from doing something about it.

"It's against hospital policy to prescribe heat suppressants," the doctor said. After the struggle to get Dean the morning after pill, John wasn't even surprised at that, just dully angry. Then the doctor surprised John and added, "However in this situation, since it's vitally important to have an accurate temperature, so we can monitor for signs of infection, it's medically necessary to end his heat early. I've already put in an order for the drugs."

"Thank you," John said. 

After a few more minutes of the doctor talking medical stuff that didn't really seem to matter, the man left and John settled back into the chair near Dean's bed. He touched him as much as he dared, pushing down his animal urges to mate, which ebbed and waned. The nurses came and went, taking vitals, administering drugs, some of them the anti-heat drugs obviously, because over time, Dean's scent faded and John finally felt the relief. Dean drifted into what was clearly a deeper, more restful sleep. Sam's stomach gurgled and his own rumbled as he suddenly became aware that it was nine at night and he hadn't had anything since breakfast, Sam probably nothing since lunch, though the boy hadn't made a single complaint about it. John did, after all, have two boys to take care of.

"Let's go get you some food," John said. "I think they have him pretty well sedated and we can risk a trip to the cafeteria."

Luckily, the cafeteria was still open and John was able to get them some passable burgers and a big paper cup of caffeine for himself. Sam applied himself silently for a while to the problem of satisfying his hunger. 

Only when the burger and most of the rest of the things on their tray had disappeared did Sam ask, "What's going to happen? Are you going to mate Dean?"

"That all depends on what Dean wants, kiddo," John said. "I always thought I would, but I'd never force him into anything. If he wants to mate someone else, or if he wants to spend his life on suppressants, that's what's going to happen." 

"Just promise me you won't hurt him, ever," Sam said. His voice got a little quavery when he said, "Every time I close my eyes, I see it. I see them holding him down and..."

Tragedy and trauma, John had learned over the years, rarely kept itself confined to the person it had been visited on. It spread through families in ripples and waves. Sam had seen his brother's rape, the end of it anyway. He was a victim of it too. Of course, just knowing about trauma and it's affects didn't make John any more qualified, any better at soothing and healing it. He stormed into town, fought and killed, stopped the thing making the trauma. Sometimes his methods caused more trauma. He'd always hurried away before the effects of the trauma could be felt by the survivors, much less had to be dealt with. He didn't have that luxury this time. 

"Tell me about it," John said. "Tell me what happened."

John listened, tried to listen like he would have listened to a witness he was interviewing for a hunt, with rapt attention and really hearing it, so he could comb through it for the important details. And John did file the details away for later. There would be people who had to be dealt with. Things that would happen. Later. When Dean wasn't in a hospital bed and his other son wasn't shaking at the memories.

When Sam got to the point where John had made it to the hospital, John stopped him and said, "You did good, son. You're a hero."

"But I didn't save him. I didn't stop them. I couldn't even get him to stay home from school today," Sam said, looking up. His eyes were bright with unshed tears about to spill over. 

"You did everything you could. And you did stop them. We don't know how much longer those monsters might have had him if you didn't go looking for him. You were the one who got the teachers at his school to realize something was wrong. Not every hero goes in with fists or guns blazing. C'mon, let's eat up and get back to Dean."

The next morning, after a hard night spent in the chairs next to Dean's bedside, the lawyers from the school district came, the superintendent behind them. Dean was already in surgery, getting his face repaired. 

"We have a generous settlement offer for you, for medical expenses, the value of your Omega, and the like," the first lawyer said, pushing a bundled of papers at him. She was a woman who should have been pretty, and she had all the conventional trappings of it, from a slender body well displayed in her skirt suit, to the blonde hair and symmetrical features, but there was just something ugly about the way she looked at him and the rest of the world around her. It was all he could do not to say, "Christo" at her, as if she were a demon. 

He flipped through the pages, then settled down to read. It was a contract. Several contracts actually. They didn't seem to expect him to read it before he signed it, because the woman lawyer shoved a pen at him. One thing John had found over the years was that people assumed he was stupid. It was the blue collar look he had. You couldn't get much more working class looking if you tried. Maybe he'd just barely scraped a pass through high school and college hadn't been an option for him, but he wasn't so stupid as to sign a contract without reading it and realize only later that the terms of it screwed him and his. He pushed the pen away and kept reading.

"Mr. Chambers is a very busy man," the woman lawyer told him. "We don't have all day for you read all the details. It's a more than generous offer."

After a night sitting up by the bedside of his battered and broken Omega son and possible future mate, John's temper hovered somewhere between pissed off mama bear and starving Wendigo. It hadn't occurred to him that he could get the school system to pay for what had happened on their property. Once he realized that, even if it wasn't his normal way to get revenge, he was going to take them for everything he could. The way the lawyers and the superintendent were acting, he knew he had them by the legal shorthairs and they knew it. They were responsible for what happened on the school grounds. They wouldn't have come up with an offer so quickly if they weren't afraid he could sue the pants off them. He normally didn't want to have anything to do with the law, with mainstream authorities. He had to, this time, for Dean's sake. 

He pushed away the contract and said, "You know, I believe I'm going to seek my own legal counsel before signing any contract. That's my right."

"No lawyer in this town's going to talk to you," the superintendent muttered threateningly.

"Not in this town, no," John agreed. Actually, he didn't know if the woman he was thinking about would speak to him either, but he'd saved her and her kids, a boy and a girl, both under ten, when her husband had gone rugaru. He'd eaten the babysitter, or at least part of that poor Omega boy, before John had gotten him. That had been on their previous pass through Illinois, about four years ago. He'd driven through her town just a few weeks ago and her shingle was still hung out. It was only about an hour or so from here. "I'll get back to you after I've had my lawyer review your offer."

Once the people from the school system were gone, John actually read over the settlement from the school system and he just about laughed, bitterly. They proposed to give him seventy thousand dollars, for hospital bills and everything. Now, from what John knew about hospital bills, and God knew he'd skipped out on enough of them, they were probably tipping close to fifty grand already, what with the two surgeries and the orthopedic work. He shoved the papers aside and grabbed his notebook, flipping to the middle pages, where he'd made a note on the rugaru he'd taken out, the lawyer's husband. There, taped to that page, he found her business card. Anne Burke, attorney at law. Meanwhile, Sam had picked up the offer and he'd started to read through it. 

"What does release of all liability mean?" Sam asked.

"It means the school system is trying to weasel their way out of any responsibility for what happened," John said. 

"Did you mean that about having your own lawyer?" Sam asked, disbelief clear in his voice. 

"There's a woman, not far from here. I helped her out a while back," John said. "I'm hoping for once, one of the people we save is willing to return the favor. I'm going to call her now. You hold down the fort."

He reached her without difficulty, explained who he was and almost had her hang up on him once she realized, but he said, "Please, I saved your children once. I need help for my son."

There was a long silence on the line but she didn't hang up. Finally, there was a sigh and she asked, "What do you need my help with? Not another one of those...creatures, I hope."

"No," John said. "I can handle any Rugarus I come across. This is more in your wheelhouse."

"Did your son get himself arrested? Because I'm not a criminal defense lawyer. I handle civil suits, liability issues, the like."

"Precisely," John said. "My son was assaulted on school property."

He explained to her what happened, as much as he knew about the assault, how pushy they'd been about getting him to sign something now, about how laughably little it was in the face of how big the medical bills were likely to be. She listened, asked a few questions, then finally said, "I'll be by later today, as soon as I can, with the forms you'll need to sign to have me represent you. Don't talk to these people again. If they come around to badger you, let them know your attorney will be speaking to their attorneys. And for God's sake, don't sign anything before I have a chance to review it."

John went back to his son's room. Dean still wasn't back yet. Sam was curled up in the more comfortable of the two chairs, sleeping. John settled himself in the other chair, already anticipating his sore back. Thankfully, the school system's lawyers didn't bother him again. Sam stirred a little, but did not wake. Dean's surgery continued. Eventually, Sam woke and they went down to the cafeteria again for some food. 

"Why is it taking so long?" Sam complained, picking apart his grilled cheese, rather than eating it. John should have said something to Sam about wasting food, how they didn't have the money for him to just throw away food, but he didn't have the heart to do it. John hadn't gotten himself anything other than some coffee, pretty sure he couldn't eat, not until he knew Dean was out of surgery and safe.

"Shouldn't Dean be out of surgery by now?"

"They're operating on his face," John said. "You don't want them to hurry. It's delicate work."

The fact was, it might not have been just the jaw and occipital bone that he'd been told about. Or they might not have been the simple fractures that had been implied. John had seen Dean's face and it was a mess. Wiring up a simple fracture of the jaw shouldn't take this long, but if they'd decided to put in screws and plates, that might take much longer. With the face involved, they might not just have an orthopedic surgeon involved, but a plastic surgeon as well. 

When they got back to Dean's room, the lawyer was waiting for them, not looking anything like John expected out of a lawyer. She wasn't in a suit, but in jeans and she wore a black leather jacket. She wore a big, silver Solomon's seal pendant around her neck, as well as other several other sigils- rings on her fingers. She had her two kids with her, now looking to be about eight and twelve. He might have thought witch, but she was too obvious about it. She wore the pentagram plastered all over herself. She was more likely a wanna be, a Wiccan at best. 

"Sorry I had to bring my kids along," she said. "All these years later and still nobody will babysit for my family. I suppose the crazy witch lady look doesn't help, but I did research, after it happened. Due diligence. I have do whatever it takes to protect my family, what's left of it."

John took another look at the kids and realized that both of them were decorated with silver necklaces as well, protective amulets. "There's other things I can show you," John said. "To protect your kids, your home."

"Later," she said. "So, is there some place we can talk?"

They ended up back in the cafeteria, Sam at another table, talking to the lawyer's kids, a boy and girl. "So, when you say assaulted on school grounds, exactly what do you mean?"

So John told the story again, what he knew personally, what Sam had explained to him. She frowned when she realized that Dean had been in heat but nodded when John made it clear that Dean might have been in heat, but that school authorities had made no attempt to send him home, protect him. She seemed excited somehow, like a hunting dog with prey in its nose. 

When John had told her everything he knew, she said, "You know, this town is infamous. Made a couple of national magazines with a story like this, gang rape, covered up by the school and the police. Only, we have them this time. It happened on school grounds, during the school day. We have school employees as witnesses."

"They won't talk," John said, thinking of the way the school secretary and gym teacher had scurried away last night, so they wouldn't be seen talking to him. 

"Once we get our suit filed, a subpoena says they'll talk. Now, let's talk again about the police harassment you received last night." 

 

***

Sam had gotten stuck with entertaining the lawyer's kids somehow. They had been sat down at a table across the room and Dad had given him that look, the one that meant that Sam was expected to not just behave himself as well as a normal kid would, but that more was expected out of him. He was expected to protect these kids, as best he could. Not that anything was liable to happen, but Sam was definitely on duty. Meanwhile, Penny, the younger, kept staring over to the table where Dad and the lawyer sat. 

"Your daddy killed our daddy," she said eventually.

The older one, Danny, said, "Uh-uh. It wasn't our daddy. It was a monster. The monster ate Jordan and it nearly ate you. His daddy saved our lives."

"Then where's Daddy? Where did he go? He wouldn't leave us."

"Just shut up! He's gonna come back. He's not dead."

Then, apropos of nothing, Penny said, "Our mommy is a witch. If you hurt us, she's gonna curse you."

There was a scuffle under the table and Penny yelped. Sam recognized the sounds of someone getting kicked under the table for saying too much, something he'd been well familiar with for a while, before he got it clear that Winchesters did what they had to do and they didn't talk about it to outsiders. 

"Penny means Mom is a Wiccan. Not a witch," Danny said. "She doesn't hurt people."

"I know," Sam said. "If she was a witch, my Dad wouldn't be talking to her. My dad kills witches."

Then he felt like crying because Dean wasn't here to kick his shin under the table.

 

***

Dean drifted a long time in the fuzzy darkness that he recognized as drugged sleep. He hadn't been in the hospital a lot, but the couple of times he had, they'd been doozies. He could sort of feel the pain in his face and other parts of his body during those times he bobbed closer to the surface of consciousness, but he didn't really care about it. He felt it but it didn't affect him. Each time he woke, it was for a little longer and he was a little more aware of his surroundings. He didn't remember a lot of recent happenings clearly. There was the attack, which he firmly put off thinking about every time it came to mind. There was the hospital. Dad was there, he thought. Dad had come. Dad had told him that it would be okay, that the attack was over. That he needed to let the doctors and nurses do their work. 

This time he was waking, he could hear Sam's voice, complaining. "When's he gonna wake up?"

"You have to give him time, Sam," a female voice said. A nurse maybe? A doctor?

"He's been unconscious forever," Sam whined. 

"Maybe twenty-four hours or so," the woman's voice said. "He's been under heavy sedation. You need to be quiet and let him rest."

Because he wanted to reassure Sam that he was okay, Dean struggled to open his eyes, could feel his eyelids start to flutter. Or eyelid rather. He had some kind of bandage over his face that seemed to cover most of his one eye. He needed to get away, to make sure Sam was okay, because the last thing Dean really remembered clearly was Sam in that locker room. His dad telling him everything was okay he just kind of half remembered, like someone had told him that his dad was there. He decided to try and talk. If he could. The last time he'd woken up in the hospital, he'd still had some kind of tube down his throat.

He shaped the words in his mind and then heard himself saying them, but he sort of panicked, because while his tongue and lips could move, his jaw was completely immobile. And didn't that feel weird, talking without moving his jaw?

"Smmmy? S'm?" he called out, thrashing a little around in his bed, trying to sit up but not quite managing it.

There were firm but gentle hands on him, pressing him back down to the bed. One of them smelled strange, maybe the woman he'd heard earlier, but the other person was familiar. His scent evoked safety, family, everything that Dean constantly craved. Dad. Dad was here. Dean laid back, relaxing. Dad was here and it would be okay. He didn't need to worry about Sammy, because Dad was here and that that meant Dean could be off duty. It took a while longer but Dean could finally open his eye. The other one was definitely swathed in some kind of bandage. 

"Hey, tiger," Dad said, smiling huge at Dean and caressing his temple- the one that wasn't covered in bandages. "Look who's back in the land of the living. Don't try and talk just yet. Your jaw is wired together."

"D'd?" Dean asked. 

"It's okay, Dean. Everything is swollen up right now. They say you should be able to talk more or less normally even with your jaw wired shut, once the swelling goes down. I'm here. Sam's here. All you have to do right now is rest up and get better."

Reassured, as much by the scent of his father and Sam as by anything else, Dean let himself relax and lie back against the pillow. A little later, a woman, a nurse, asked him questions about how he felt, did medical things. She touched him softly and spoke in sure, measured tones of the things they'd done to get him patched up. It just felt so damn good, despite everything else, to be taken care of for once. She helped him get a drink of cold water, and it was bliss, flooding into his parched mouth and down his throat. Then she gave him another shot, right into his IV port, and things felt much better after that. He drifted in a kind of cotton candy cloud of artificial happiness.

When he woke later, he hadn't even been aware he'd been sleeping again until he drifted to consciousness. He didn't even have to open his eyes to realize that Sam was alone in the room with him. Dad was gone for the moment. His scent, good and strong, lingered, but he wasn't there. 

Sam seemed to guess what he was thinking, and said, "Dad just went to get some caffeine. He should be back soon."

Dean opened his eye. The room was mostly dark, the overhead light off, just a dim light by the door on. The window was dark too. It had been light earlier. He'd slept through most of the day and it was night time. The last time he'd slept that much had been the last time he'd landed himself in the hospital, that time he'd nearly drowned rescuing that kid from the lake and gotten himself aspiration pneumonia for the trouble. This time though, he wasn't the hero in the situation. He was the victim. He didn't remember every bit of it clearly, but he remembered exactly how he'd been hurt. God, how could Sam and Dad even stand to look at him? He'd fought, done his best, and it hadn't been good enough to keep him safe. He remembered mostly how ineffectual he'd been against those massive Alphas. They'd held him down like he was a fly with a pin. They'd torn him apart just because they could, torn his wings off like a cruel kid would to a bug. They'd just taken what they'd wanted and used him, because they could and because Dean couldn't stop them. Because he'd been so stupid as to walk into a locker room when he was in heat, been too stupid to even know that. Not able or willing to face Sam, knowing that his little brother had seen it happen, Dean closed his eyes again and willed himself to go back to sleep. Eventually, it worked.

It went like that for a while. He'd wake, realize what had happened and retreat back to sleep, to unconsciousness. They let him sleep, or rest or whatever. He didn't have to deal. He could just run away into blackness. 

At least until another whole day had passed in periods of blackness, speckled with moments of wakefulness. Or so he thought. 

Eventually, he couldn't keep his eye shut. It was daylight and he was alone in the room with Dad. 

"S'm?" Dean asked, as usual, his first thought for his little brother. 

"I made him go to school," Dad said. "I let him miss Monday and Tuesday, but it was time he got back. I'll have to go pick him up before too long."

That meant it was Wednesday, at a minimum. He'd managed to miss most of Saturday through Tuesday.

"We're worried about you," Dad said. "Really worried. Some of your wounds got infected, looked like they were about to go septic. Like you were giving up. There was talk of moving you to the ICU. You're not completely out of the woods yet, but you're better than you were. I knew you'd fight and pull through. You're my fighter. Tough as nails."

Dean had to swallow hard to beat down the sob that wanted to rise up in the back of his throat. Thank God Dad hadn't actually been there to see how worthless Dean had been in his last fight. 

Dad must have heard, because he said, "I'm so proud of you Dean. You survived against terrible odds. I'm sorry. I should have been there Friday morning. None of this would have happened if I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. If I'd been where I should have been."

That wasn't true. This happened because Dean was weak, because he was stupid. Because he didn't deserve anything else. 

"Dean, I understand if you don't want an Alpha after this, ever again," Dad said. "But I'm hoping you'll at least let me scent mark you to make it clear you're protected. What I'm really praying for is for you to allow me to claim you properly. That you'll let me show you just how good it should be between an Alpha and an Omega."

Was his father saying he wanted Dean, even though he had to know just how damaged Dean was? He knew, if not exactly, but basically what had happened. And he wasn't going to put Dean aside like most Alphas would have. Dean's virginity had been taken. The health class Dean had managed to catch most of last year had made it clear that the most precious thing an Omega had was his virginity and that without it, he was just so much trash. But Dad still wanted him. 

"You don't have to tell me what you want now," Dad said. "But please let me scent mark you soon. We might have to be in this town for a while longer. You're going to need to talk to the police about what happened."

It was all a little too much all of a sudden. Dean couldn't even imagine talking about what happened to anyone, much less some strange police officer. The memories were sharp and crystal clear, like broken glass in his mind. 

 

***

John's heart was breaking as he watched his beautiful Omega son's face crumple. Dean didn't break down and cry, not for lack of Dean wanting to, but something seemed to stop him. John yearned to pull him close and tight, to hold him and never let him go. That was the true place of an Alpha- to love and protect their Omega. He hadn't even claimed his Omega, but had already failed him. Now he was in a hospital bed, so busted and fragile he couldn't even be held, except for perhaps in the most tentative ways, like holding an eggshell when what John wanted, needed, was to crush his Omega to his chest. 

"No," John said, decisively. "You don't have to talk to the police, not now. Not until you feel ready, even if that's never. They'll have to come through me."

Dean relaxed a little. John grabbed a cloth and dampened it. He wiped his Omega's face down, the parts not covered by gauze, hoping the cool cloth soothed more than hurt. Dean sighed and relaxed even further. "Alpha," he murmured, then closed his eyes. 

Dean was still worryingly hot with fever, despite the antibiotics and other drugs, his skin dry to the touch. The cool cloth seemed to sooth him a little, so John got up and rinsed it out in the room's sink and laid it on Dean's forehead again. Dean seemed to drift back into an easier sleep as John tended to him. Eventually, John set the rag aside and settled back into the chair near Dean's bed, holding Dean's hand. Dean drifted into an even deeper sleep, another sign that, at least subconsciously, he'd begun to accept John as his Alpha. 

John wondered if Dean would ever recover to the point where he'd fully take John as his Alpha, if there would ever be shared heats and children. There had been talk of a hysterectomy. The infected wounds were the lacerations on his cervix and the infection had flared suddenly and devastatingly. Then they'd tried a different antibiotic and it had started working. There was no danger of Dean needing that surgery now, but there would be scarring on his cervix. It would make childbearing difficult. Not impossible, but the doctor had said that Dean might never give birth naturally- that he might always have to have c-sections. But that might well be academic. Dean might never get to the point where he could bear someone touching him intimately. He might elect to take suppressants and never have a heat again. John thought he could handle that. He'd been without sex for so long, since his boys' mother had died. At least he would have the consolation of a mate at his side, someone to protect and cherish. Perhaps it was for the best. He never thought he'd wanted any one in his bed after Mary's death. He could have parts of having a mate again at least, even if not all of them.. 

It was all up to Dean though, and what he wanted and needed. 

 

***

The longer Sam had to hang around this stupid town, the angrier he became. School had become a minefield more quickly than Sam imagined. Word had gotten around to the middle school about Dean. Sam had gone to school on Wednesday and Thursday and he'd been sent to the office three times for fighting. But he'd heard Dean called a slut and a whore and blamed for Friday's football game forfeit so many times that he felt like he was going to explode. On Thursday morning, when Jamie Ferguson had handed him a ten and asked him to set up an appointment with his whore Omega brother, Sam had exploded. Jamie Ferguson was already bloody and limp when Sam had been pulled off him. Now Sam was expelled from school, which was just fine by him. There'd be a new school soon enough and for now, there was no reason to keep him away from the hospital and from Dean.

He'd picked up a newspaper in the waiting room at the hospital because he'd finished his school work and both of his library books. It'd seemed an innocent enough thing to do. It'd been nearly a week since Dean had been raped and it had fallen off the headlines of the local paper, so he thought he'd be safe from reading about it. How wrong he'd been. Finished with what passed for news in this place, he'd flipped to the op ed pages, to discover an editorial about the rape. Or rather, the supposed unfairness of the continued suspension of the football team and those who were found in the locker room. They were innocent until proven guilty, which was true enough. But what really got Sam was the way they vilified Dean, without ever identifying him, of course, because he was a minor. They certainly gave enough clues- called him an outsider, identified the exact day that the Winchesters had come to this nothing little town in the middle of nowhere. The article pointed out that the unnamed victim had been living at a motel, named the exact one even and wondered where his Alpha had been. The editorial said they blamed it all on the fact that Dean's parents weren't there watching him, but they made sure to call Dean a vixen, a Lolita, a tramp and other names that all meant one thing- slut. Sam knew, because any that he didn't recognize, he dragged out his pocket dictionary from his backpack to look up. 

Sam had been waiting for his Dad to get done talking to his lawyer again. They were sitting in a waiting room down the hallway from Dean's hospital room. This time she'd brought her kids again, but they were busy working on their own homework this time. A nurse approached Dad and Dad got up and hurried down the hallway with her. Dean was still direfully sick. The infection he'd gotten had flared up again and his fever was back to dangerous heights, despite the drugs, making him delirious. 

Sam crumpled the newspaper with the awful editorial and he looked at Dad's lawyer, remembered what her own kid had said about her.

"Mrs. Burke, is it true you're a witch?" he asked. She didn't look very much like a witch today. She was wearing a black suit with long sleeves and a plain white shirt. Her sigil tattoos and her jewelry were all covered up and tucked away. Her only visible jewelry was a watch. She looked like a lawyer on a TV show. 

"I'm not sure what you've heard..." she started.

"Are you a witch? Can you help me get revenge for Dean? It's not bad enough those boys hurt him so bad, the newspaper is calling him names. It's like everyone in town is blaming him for what happened, not those boys on the football team."

"Sam, you have to trust that your father and I are going after the right people. We're going after the ones that are truly responsible for creating an atmosphere where this kind of behavior isn't just tolerated but allowed to flourish. We're going after them in the way that's the right way."

"Are you a witch?"

"I'm not. But I know someone who is," she admitted. "She knows a few spells that are actually effective. I know you're really angry, but you have to be careful. The cost is higher than you think."

"I don't care," Sam said. All he cared about was seeing that the people that had hurt Dean were hurt just as bad in return. As it was, nothing bad was happening to them. They were all free, walking around the streets. They were still suspended from school, but that wasn't much of a punishment. "I just want them to be going through what Dean is going through right now."

"Exactly what he's going through?"

"It's only fair," Sam said. He thought about Dean burning up with fever down the hallway. They could at least get as sick as they'd made Dean. 

"Sort of an instant Karma," the lawyer witch said, as if she was thinking hard. "I'll ask my friend what she thinks. It couldn't hurt to just ask about it."

Then Dad came back. "They've decided to move Dean to the ICU for now," he said. 

 

***

Dean did get better, mostly. He did finally throw off his infection for good. He got strong enough to sit up. He could sip at things through his wired up jaw, so they could take the NG tube out. His bruises faded and healed. His facial swelling went down, so he looked almost like his normal self. The surgeons apparently had been able to repair the breaks in his face without leaving much in the way of sutures on Dean's face, just a couple of stitches. There would supposedly be little or no scarring. What didn't get better was Dean's voice. He just stopped speaking, didn't even try. John remembered how, as a traumatized little boy just after the fire, Dean stopped speaking. Just as then, he didn't pressure Dean to talk and hoped that, as Dean did back then, he would start talking again in his own time.

The day they released Dean from the hospital, Anne Burke came back to him with a credible out of court offer- a million, a massive amount of money for the school district to come up with. Of course, a huge chunk of that would go right to the hospital for medical bills and another huge part for taxes. They might not have gotten that much, but Dean had written down the word Coach Peterson one day and pushed it across the tray table at John. Because Dean wasn't even trying to talk, John had finally gotten out of Dean, by slow yes no questioning, and a few hastily scribbled notes, that two of the football coaches had come into the room while the rape was going on and not only hadn't stopped it, but condoned it. That had shut the Superintendent right the fuck up with a red, angry face and gotten them to come forward with a huge chunk of what was quite clearly hush money. John didn't care. Dean deserved every cent of it. 

"So this is it," Anne said as she went over the papers with him before Dean was released. "They don't just want release of their liability. They want full non-disclosure, as much as is legal anyway. They wanted Dean to agree not to testify against any of the boys on the football team. I pointed out that the police were involved and if he's subpoenaed to testify, he has to. But this is what the kind of victory I can get you looks like. As your attorney, I'm going to advise you to sign. Dean doesn't get his day in court, but I don't think Dean wants that anyway. At least not now. This is justice, such as I can get for him."

John signed without hesitation. In his current state, there was no way Dean would be able to speak to the police, much less testify in court. There were a lot of papers to sign, because John was having Anne set most of what they were getting for Dean into a trust. John knew that left in his hands, the money would melt away into ammo, expenses on the road and his buddies Jim, Jack and Jose. Because Dean deserved it. Because if there was any question before of his Omega going out on the hunt, there was certainly no chance of it now. 

No, they would have to find a place to settle, at least part of the time. Most of the time. John yearned to take Dean home. He wasn't sure if that was back to Kansas or what home even was at this point, beyond their car, but he wanted to take Dean there. He pictured a house and maybe a couple of kids eventually. It all depended on what Dean wanted though and Dean wasn't saying. 

John finished signing the papers, shook Anne's hand and then went to help Dean get dressed. 

***

Anne watched John Winchester slump down the hallway. She remembered her first sight of him, back when. Before. He'd seemed like some kind of action hero from the movies, like that Bruce Willis character from Die Hard, when he'd burst into her house, not in time to save poor Jordan, but in time to save her kids, when she herself had been unable to do anything but curl herself into a corner and scream, unaware even of what she was doing. John Winchester had been larger than life and pure adrenaline as he'd advanced on the thing that was all that remained of her husband. He'd moved with fluid grace and the lack of doubt that came with holy purpose. And when it'd been done and she'd gone hysterical on him, he let her beat on him with flailing blows for a good fifteen minutes until she'd fallen boneless into a sobbing heap. Then he'd just said to her, "You got somewhere to go? Your mother's maybe?" She'd nodded, so he'd said, "Good, get your kids out of here. I'll clean this up."

She'd gone, just gotten into the car with Danny and Penny without even so much as her purse. When she'd come back a few days later, her house looked just like it always had, other than that Mark was gone. There was no trace of blood, no trace of Jordan's, there was no other way to say it, partially eaten body. To this day, and Anne had lied through her teeth about this, his poor parents thought that he'd run off with Mark, which wasn't as big a lie as you'd think. She was morally certain that Jordan and Mark had been fucking. Before he'd turned from an asshole into a monster. 

Of John Winchester, she'd thought there'd been no trace left either, until a few weeks later, she'd found the name and phone number, with a note that said, "If you have any more of this particular kind of trouble," written on a small scrap of paper that looked like it'd been torn out of a notebook, tucked under the phone in her front hallway. She still had the number pressed inside the pages of a Bible she hadn't cracked open since. 

She hoped that she'd been able to be a little for him like he'd been for her. His first phone call sounded lost, desperate. Not that he was curled up in the corner screaming, like she had been. He was obviously a man not given to panic, but as he'd told her the story of how his son had been battered to an inch of his life right under the nose of those who should have been watching out for him, he'd sounded as unmoored as she remembered feeling. In the short time since his first call, she'd come to know him as a man who was tight lipped with praise and affection, but despite that, it was obvious he adored his Omega son, in a way that was constant and deep. You could tell that John would move heaven and earth for his Omega, that there was nothing he wouldn't give for the boy. As a Beta, she couldn't say she understood the Alpha custom of mating their oldest Omega child, but there was no doubt that John was devoted to his Omega in a way she'd never been to Mark, not even in their first year of marriage. 

So, if she could do a little ass kicking for him, act like the equivalent of Bruce Willis, but in her own particular wheelhouse, well, she was going to. And she had. She'd pulled a far bigger cash settlement out of the school system than she'd ever anticipated. It was almost enough she wished she'd gone for a percentage like she normally would have for a contingency case. But she hadn't. She'd charged just enough of an hourly to cover her costs and time. It was only fair. The man had saved her kids' lives. She fucking owed him. Now, maybe, they were a little equal. 

She felt in her jacket pocket for the thing that would bring them more than equal. It was just a little medallion with a hole drilled in it, strung on a long necklace. Maggie, her friend who was teaching her a little witchcraft of the harmless kind, didn't know anything, but she had a friend who was the real thing and had feminist and pro-Omega outlook. This friend of a friend, Jenna, had jumped at the chance to do something about the situation in this crap town. 

 

"Did you find anything?" she heard, as she mused over these things while packing her briefcase. It was the boy, Sam, John's other son, the little Alpha, or rather, Alpha to be. But this one wasn't going to be anything but Alpha when he grew up. Anyone could tell that.

She grabbed the medallion from her pocket and slipped it to him quickly. She suspected John Winchester would not be best pleased to find her supplying his Alpha son with witchcraft. 

"You know the statue of Justice in the middle of the courthouse lawn?" she asked. Like all county seats, this town had one of those blocky courthouses set in the middle of a town square. This one was Victorian and built of brick, with preposterous amounts of Italianate white scrolls everywhere. The courtrooms themselves were small, uncomfortable and not air-conditioned. 

"The ugly one?" he asked. "It's all green?"

Yeah, justice in this town was a really ugly affair and more than a little corroded. She didn't feel bad about this, not one bit. She didn't know where Jenna had gotten the medallion, but she knew enough to know it was powerful magic. 

"That's the one. You need to hang this medallion around it's neck. It'll wake up justice. People in this town will start getting what they deserve. Do you need help getting it in place?"

Sam thought for a moment. "No, I can do that."

***

Sam struggled up the statue. He was a good climber, but the statue was taller than it looked, and even though the drapey robes cast out of bronze or whatever this metal was, looked like they should give good handholds, they didn't. It was a dark night too. Ms. Burke had been very specific- it had to be done on the night of the new moon. At least it had been easy enough to sneak out of their room. Dad's attention, rightly, had been completely on Dean. 

Dean, who hadn't said a word since before his infection had gotten really bad in the hospital. They hadn't wanted to release Dean. They'd wanted to transfer him to the psych floor of the hospital, but Dad hadn't let them. Dean on a locked ward meant him being someplace Dad couldn't watch him. Because Dean had hardly been out of Dad's sight since he'd gotten to the hospital. Oh, a few minutes to get food, maybe to shave and shower. Maybe to meet with Ms. Burke, but never more than half an hour. It was what Sam had always wanted- their dad being around to take care of them, but he hadn't wanted it this way. Why should it take Dean being hurt so bad for their Dad to do what he should have been doing in the first place?

So Dad had been sleeping in Dean's bed, wrapped around Dean, like he seemed to be so much these days. They'd both been fast asleep and it had been easy enough to slip out of the room, shutting the door softly behind him. It hadn't always been like that. It wasn't that Dad was a terribly deep sleeper, but Sam could always sneak past him. No, it was Dean he couldn't get past. Sam had hardly even been able to go to the bathroom without Dean waking up. But tonight, Dean was still on pain pills. They'd made him dead to the world. It was just another difference, another thing that felt out of place. It hurt to think of Dean no longer able be his vigilant big brother, that Dean needed protection instead.

Sam nearly slipped, but he scrabbled at the statue and found a fingerhold, then another, then a nearly horizontal fold where he could rest a foot. If he was careful, he could plant the other foot on the handle of the sword the Lady Justice carried, pointed down to the ground, not in action. Thus situated, he dug in his pocket for the medallion. He just barely got it over her head, but it settled into her metallic bosom with a little clink. Then he slipped. Or something. He'd thought he had a pretty good grip on the statue, but he suddenly found himself falling. It wasn't far and he just landed on his butt, a little startled but not hurt. He picked himself up, rubbing his behind. 

Nothing had changed. There was no flash of light. No sudden smiting thunderbolts from heaven. The high school football stadium didn't suddenly blow up. Nothing was different than before. Not that he really thought it would be, but he still felt disappointed somehow. Then he walked around to the front of the statue to make sure the medallion had actually gotten onto the statue. It was different, he thought. Hadn't that statue been one of the blindfolded Lady Justice statues? And hadn't her sword been pointed at the ground before? He wasn't sure. His head felt kind of funny, like he'd hit it on the way down, even though he knew he hadn't. He shrugged. He'd done what Ms. Burke had said to do and he'd just have to wait and see if the medallion actually did what she said, if it would wake up justice.

Sam walked back to the motel. It didn't take long. You could walk from one side of the town to the other in just over an hour, that meant from cornfield to cornfield. Their motel was on the small state highway heading out of town to the south and it still only took Sam fourteen minutes to walk back there. The town wasn't big on streetlights, so there was plenty of shadow to duck into when the few cars that were out that night passed him. Not that he thought he'd get accused of anything, but kids his age weren't supposed to be out this late. 

When he let himself back into the motel room, Dad woke up, lifted his head from Dean's limp shoulder. 

"Where were you, Sam?" he demanded, his voice no less urgent for being soft and low. 

"I couldn't sleep. I couldn't even breathe in here. I went for a walk," Sam said. 

"Well, don't do that again. It's too dangerous," Dad said, sitting up in bed. "At least in this town. We're not real popular here. I couldn't stand it if you got hurt also."

"I had my knife," Sam said, defensively. His butterfly knife was folded up and stashed in his jacket pocket. 

"Sam, please," his Dad said. "Just don't. Just promise me you won't go out on your own in this town again. I know you're going to be an Alpha and you think you're trained to fight but I just couldn't stand it if you were hurt. You're just a little boy."

Sam cut him off. That concern was all he had ever wanted to hear from the man who'd put a .45 in his hand when he'd been scared of something in his closet. Of course, it had been Dean who'd actually laid awake and put a consecrated iron round into...whatever that thing had been that had creeped out of the closet in that motel room.

"It's okay, Dad," Sam said, kicking off his shoes. "I won't do it again. I promise. Can I sleep with you and Dean tonight?"

 

***

Six weeks later, they'd settled into an apartment in Kansas City. In the end, John couldn't bear the thought of going back to Lawrence, but when he thought of home, it was the midwest he thought of, in specific, the plains states, like Kansas, with their rolling prairies and small cities. He'd found a job as a mechanic again, something he'd done on and off over the years since the fire. It was just part time. Not that he really needed the money, what with the settlement, but he thought of that as Dean's money, and besides, a man needed to work in some way. Sam had started up school again and Dean, he was still recovering physically. Between the wired jaw and his passivity, it was hard to get enough calories into the boy for survival, much less for him to thrive. 

This morning, he and Sam were having cereal, and for Dean, John was blending up peanut butter with vanilla ice cream, half and half, a crushed up vitamin pill and a scoop of protein powder. If he could get Dean to drink half of it, he'd consider it a victory. The milkshake as blended as it was going to get, he poured half of it into a glass and set it in front of Dean with a straw in it. He put the blender pitcher on the table next to the glass. 

It just hurt to see how much weight the boy had lost in the two months since the attack. Dean had never had an ounce of pudge on him, but he'd always been a sturdy, muscular kid. Now he was as skinny as one of those fashion models. He was almost like one of those girls they put in the hospital for not eating and the doctors were using words like anorexia. It wasn't just not being able to eat real food, though that didn't help and he wasn't healing well. It had just supposed to be six weeks wired up, but yesterday at the doctor's they'd said another two weeks in the wires minimum. At least the kid's blowout fracture had healed up well enough, no lingering vision problems as far as they could tell. 

"Okay, you gotta drink all of that, Deano," John said. Dean pushed the glass away from him without even trying it. He didn't say anything, but then he hadn't said a damn thing since before he'd gotten out of the hospital, so no surprises there. 

"You have to, babe," John said. "Far as I can figure, you had five hundred calories yesterday. Maybe. You're not going to heal without something inside your belly. You know what the doctor said. You don't stop losing weight, they're going to have put you in the hospital again."

Dean would never get back to school again at this rate. Part of John didn't care. Dean was past the age where school was mandatory for Omegas. And when they'd driven to register Sam at his middle school, just the sight of the school building put Dean into that fifty yard stare, the shell-shocked one. He sometimes wondered if the doctors that had wanted Dean to spend some time in the mental hospital didn't have a point, but then, they didn't know Dean like he did. What Dean needed now was to be around the one thing that mattered most to him- his family. And John needed to have Dean around him, needed to know that he was protected. 

John Winchester hadn't had a lot of faith left in other people, especially it came to them protecting his boys, but he'd thought he could count on the schools to keep his boys safe enough during the days. Now he knew that wasn't so. And he was losing faith in his own ability to save Dean. At first, it had seemed so simple. Get the money. Get something like a home. Be there for him and protect him. Dean was slipping away though. 

Not knowing what to do, he reverted to old, familiar patterns, like people did. Just like Dean was doing now with not talking and not eating. John's pattern was 'hard ass' and it fit him like that pair of shoes that you'd had forever. 

"Anyway, nobody is getting up from this table until you finish that glass," John said. He made a show of checking his watch. "Which means you have about ten minutes before you make your brother late for school."

Dean looked at him, desperation in his eyes, asking that Sam not be included in this. It was amazing how much the boy could convey with just a flick of the eyes and an earnest look. Sam, though John had thought he'd get angry being made late because of something Dean was doing, just looked at Dean with a pleading look in his eyes. He seemed to have some idea of how dire Dean's situation with food was getting. 

"I mean it, Dean," John said, firmly. "We're not moving." He opened the paper, skipping the front page and the headlines and making for the middle pages where the stories he was interested in were usually buried. Not that he was looking for a hunt. He wasn't. If he saw one, he'd pass it off to Bobby. But it was habit. 

One article caught his eye, not so much for the content but for the place the story was from. It was from the small town in Illinois they'd just moved from. The county government under federal scrutiny, the article said. Accusations of corruption and bribery were being looked into by the DOJ and FBI. The state's attorney was looking into the situation as well, in particular at the local prosecutor and his office. There was talk of the prosecutor being disbarred from law completely, that the Illinois ARDC had uncovered numerous ethics violations. Of course, no one was ever particularly surprised by news of government corruption coming from the state of Illinois. Just a coincidence, he thought. 

Across the table, Dean was sipping tentatively at the milk shake, as if it was the hardest thing in the world and it broke John's heart as he remembered how just two months or so before, he'd taken Dean to lunch at a diner one day and seen him down a milkshake in less than five minutes, then pile a burger and fries, a piece of pie and half of his brother's meatloaf plate on top of it. That was the day before he'd left for the hunt he'd been returning from on the day their world had shattered. 

It had been a day much like any other in their lives. He hadn't had a second thought about leaving Dean and Sam alone in a motel room alone for a few days. He'd done it for years. He'd just been doing what he had to do. So he'd thought. Dean had been his soldier, a boy as tough as a man. Still was, dealing with his attack. But why should he have to? He looked at his Omega, toughing out the order John had just given him and he melted. Or broke down or something. Things had to be different. They had to break old patterns. 

John reached out for him, pulled him out of his chair and onto his own lap. He put the milkshake, with less than a quarter of the glass gone, aside and said, "You made a good effort. Maybe we'll try again later. Let's walk Sammy to school now."

"I can walk myself," Sam said as John snuggled Dean closer to him. His Omega snuggled back, burying his face in John's shoulder. 

"You could, but I don't want you to, and it'll be good for Dean to get out," John said. He'd picked this apartment because it was close to a good school for Sam, but even though it was less than four blocks, this was still the city and things could happen in less than four blocks. Things could happen during the school day when boys were supposed to be under teachers' watchful eyes. 

A little later, they were walking Sam to school. It was a brisk, early December day. The day was bright, the sky blue. It was gray all of yesterday, but hadn't even rained, much less snowed. Today, it had cleared and the temperature was finally dropping into the freezing range. Dean had been shivering even just standing in their doorway, so John had put his own coat onto the boy's shoulders, the leather one that was even a little big on him. It draped to Dean's thighs and his finger tips just stuck out of the sleeves. He'd have a lot of growing to do before it would even come close to fitting him, but it seemed to suit him. And it smelled like John, had been permeated with John's odors from all its years of wear. No one scenting Dean in that jacket would have any doubt that the Omega was protected by a big, powerful Alpha. 

Together they watched Sam walk in through one of the double doors and get swallowed up in the mass of students. Dean shuddered a little and his eyes looked yearningly after Sam. "It'll be okay, Dean," John said, pulling Dean close. "I checked the school out before I let Sam go. Things aren't like they were at your last school. They have no tolerance policies for violence and bullying. Let's get you out of the cold. You want to go to the garage with me today?"

Eleazar, the guy who owned the small, independent garage where John worked, didn't mind Dean hanging around, not when John had explained a little of what happened, not the details, just that Dean had been beaten by a group of older boys. Eli was an old school Alpha of the kind that John admired- gentle and respectful to Omegas, fair dealing, maybe a little too fair. He was always, from John could see, fixing far more things on people's cars than he charged them for, or charging just for the parts. So long as he made enough money to keep his doors open, Eli didn't care that he didn't make a lot of money. As for the way he acted around Dean, John couldn't have asked for better. Other than shaking his hand when they were first introduced, he hadn't tried to touch Dean. He spoke softly around the boy, kept any Alpha command tones out of his voice when he had to talk to Dean. 

Eli spoke adoringly about his Omega mate, proudly showing off a picture of the rotund, graying man and the wall space next to his desk, in most garages devoted to a cheesecake calendar of some kind or another, was given over to pictures of his seven grown children, their spouses and the thirty something grandchildren they'd given him. The favored spot was given over to Francis. "Frankie. My oldest Omega," he'd said, his voice wistful. "He was in love with Marcus and I could have stopped them. Could have claimed Frankie. They were prepared to run away together, so I go to Marcus, clap him on the back and welcome him to the family. What was I supposed to do? Good man, Marcus. He works here on Saturdays, just to help me out, even though I can only pay him half of what they'd pay him at the dealership."

John worked on Tues through Thursday so he'd never met Marcus yet. Dean hadn't said, or rather, indicated silently he didn't want to go to the garage, so John slung his arm over Dean's shoulders and guided them in the direction of the garage. He stopped for a moment at the turning that would have brought them back to the apartment, giving Dean a chance to indicate he'd rather go back home while John was working. Dean hadn't yet chosen waiting at home alone over going to the garage. 

Eli was already deep into the guts of a Ford Taurus when they arrived, preparing for a transmission job, from the looks of it. Getting to the transmission itself in that particular model of car was a job in itself. John took himself to his own bay and got to work. It wasn't that he was on probation, but he was still given being given the simple jobs- replacing starter engines and distributor caps, tune ups. It was only fair. He might have run his own garage once, but he was new here and he hadn't come with many of his own tools, just the basic kit that he had room for in the Impala. He was thinking of buying more, now that they were staying in one place for a while. 

John tried to set Dean up on the sofa in the back room, like usual, but a few minutes later, Dean had reappeared on the shop floor, looking for John. Dean sidled up behind John. Not that John didn't know Dean was there, but he gave no sign of it until Dean was right beside him, peering into the hood of the Crown Vic John was working on. It was a decommissioned police car, stripped of its insignia, but with the distinctive black and white paint job. 

"Hey, Dean," John said, cranking hard on a particularly stubborn bolt. For a moment, he was afraid it'd been frozen in place, that he'd have to cut it, but it finally gave way. "You want to see what I'm doing?"

Dean didn't answer, but he didn't go away either. That would have to pass for communication these days. When Dean was younger, John had started teaching him bits and pieces of mechanics, mostly on the Impala. It had been their thing, their time together. Since Dean had presented as Omega, John had sort of assumed that would stop now. Omegas weren't auto mechanics. It was hard, dirty work. It wasn't that John thought Dean wasn't capable, but most Omegas didn't want to do it. It somehow hadn't occurred to John that Dean was still basically the same person he'd been two months ago, with the same interests. One thought of the time when an Omega presented as a watershed event- that they just weren't the same person afterwards. Even the most boyish of boys might find himself suddenly obsessed with getting a mate, making babies, rather than boyish games. Rugged, tough young men became calm, pliant young mothers in less than a year. Dean wasn't the same as he'd been, but John suspected that was due far more to the assault than an basic change to Dean's nature. 

Explaining what he was doing as he went along, John pulled the burned out starter motor and grabbed the rebuilt one he'd prepped last night. Dean knew how to match up the leads correctly, but he explained again, more for the sound of his own voice filling up the silence than anything. 

"Your boy like cars?" Eli asked a while later, from across the room.

"Dean always has," John said. "I hope you don't mind me showing him a few things."

"Doesn't seem to be slowing you down any, so why should I care?"

So John got back to work, finishing up the starter motor and a few other, smaller repairs. Dean, for the first time in a while, smiled when John started up the big Ford and its engine roared to life. 

***

Dean sipped at the protein shake in front of him, trying to quell his rolling stomach, hoping, praying that he wouldn't throw up again. It was all liquid that went into him, so they didn't have to cut his jaw wires when he threw up. It came up liquid too, but it was still horrible, the way it would gush up his throat and then drip out the small opening between his teeth. 

Hopefully, it would be only a few more days of protein shakes, and milk shakes loaded with protein powder and whatever else liquid that he could managed to get up a straw and into him. They were going to the doctor again tomorrow, to see if he could finally get his wires cut, or if not, to try and figure out why he wasn't healing. Last time they'd been to the doctor, there had been talk of another surgery, of screws and plates permanently installed in his jaw. Everything else seemed to have healed up real good, even his ribs, which he knew because his dad had taken to hugging him every chance he got. Big bear hugs. Single arm squeezes casually around the shoulder in public places. Gentle nuzzles when they were sitting on the sofa together. The arm that wrapped around his middle and pulled him back into the little spoon position when he and Dad went to bed together. 

Because he and his dad were sleeping together now. Just sleeping. But it was strange. Dean had been used to sleeping with Sammy when they had to share a bed. Dad had offered Dean a choice. There was a room that was supposedly Dean's, with its own bed and furniture. He'd even tried sleeping in that bed the first night in their new place, but he didn't even make it an hour. The room smelled strange, impersonal and stale. The instant he was alone, he could feel it again, the hard hands on his arms and legs, the heavy weight on his torso, the explosions of pain that he'd mostly blocked out the first time but that seemed to permeate him every time he remembered the attack. He hadn't managed to get out of his bed, but he must have been crying loudly enough for Dad to hear, because the door to the room burst open and he was suddenly wrapped in his Dad's arms again. He'd been carried out of the lonely, new room and down the hallway to his Dad's room. That first night, Dad's room had smelled that same way, like it'd been scrubbed clean a while back and no one had been inside in months, but over that had been the glorious scent of Alpha, his Alpha. He felt safe when he could smell Dad, scent that Alpha scent. It smelled like old leather and a little smoky and a lot like the garage where Dad worked now, but mostly it smelled like warmth and safety and the promise of good things. 

He sort of thought that Dad was hugging him so much these days just to get that scent all over him. Dad was marking him, claiming him by scent. Letting the other Alphas know that Dean was protected. He liked that thought, that he was protected. It was really kind of the first time in his life he felt he was, that he remembered. Up until now, he'd been protector. His dad hadn't told him once since the attack to take care of Sammy. Part of him felt like a big fat failure. He couldn't do his one job, the one thing his dad needed him to do. Couldn't even stop his own ass from getting whipped. The rest of him didn't care. He just wanted his Dad, his Alpha, around. Holding him. His strong hands on Dean's shoulder. His confident presence at Dean's side as they were looking down into the engine of a car together. 

But before they could get back under the hood together, Dean had to finish this protein shake, even though his stomach was roiling and threatening total evacuation. It was just his stomach's reaction to food when he'd had so close to nothing for so long. That was what Dr. Jepson said. It wasn't pregnancy resulting from the attack. He'd been tested for that, then at Dean's insistence, they'd done the test again and again. He didn't trust the test for some reason. It just felt like something had been left behind during the attack, especially at first. It wasn't until the doctor had been giving him an ultrasound, to check up on his internal damage, and she'd shown him his empty womb, did he start believing he hadn't been made pregnant by one of the group of Alphas. 

"Didn't believe me that you weren't pregnant, did you?" the doctor had said. Dean had nodded. "That's a common side effect of an assault of an Omega in heat. Your body was so ready, so prepared for a baby. Some actually go into a pseudo pregnancy even if they take morning after pills like you did. And it's theorized the feeling you probably have that those Alphas left something of themselves behind is you sensing the remnants of their scent on you. Every time an Alpha has sexual contact with an Omega, they leave behind some really persistent scent markers. Especially in a situation like yours, with so many of them. It's a competition type situation. The strongest, longest lasting scent wins. It'll fade with time, or if you become intimate with another Alpha and allow him to ejaculate in you."

The doctor had spoken clinically, impersonally about this as she'd been moving the wand inside him. When Dean had heard she'd wanted to do an ultrasound on him, he'd assumed she'd be using one of those things on his belly, like they do to the pregnant person on the TV show or in the movies. Instead, he'd been confronted with this rounded tube thing that she'd insisted had to go up inside him. If his Alpha hadn't been there with him, holding his hand, standing at his head, Dean was sure he would have freaked. As it was, his Alpha's scent kept him feeling safe, even as he was sure that he shouldn't feel that. 

He'd liked the doctor, despite what she had to do to him. She didn't hassle him about not speaking, like some of the doctors he'd gone to had. Her words might be impersonal, but her hands were gentle and her eyes soft as she looked at him. She'd apologized for using the wand inside him, had even tried the belly scan first, then said she was sorry again but that she just couldn't get the pictures she needed that way. At the end, she'd pronounced him ready for intercourse and pregnancy whenever he was ready in every non-physical way and sent him away with a prescription for heat suppressants which Dad had filled right away, but which Dean hadn't started taking yet. You weren't supposed to crush up the pills and Dean couldn't get them through the small gap between his teeth. He'd been told that he wasn't so damaged he couldn't have babies, but he had scarring on his cervix which might affect his ability to deliver naturally. It seemed so far away, so abstract somehow, the thought of actually wanting babies. Omegas were supposed to be baby crazy from the minute their first heat started. 

Dean took another sip of the protein shake. It didn't come back up again. He just felt tired and wanted to give up, but his Dad wouldn't let him. He'd made it three quarters of the way through the glass and Alpha kept saying he was sure he could do the whole thing. He was sitting on Dad's lap in the small break room of the garage where Dad worked, on the grubby plaid sofa inside it. Dean knew he should feel ashamed at his position. A teenage boy like him having to sit on Daddy's lap just to be able to eat a little something, like he was a two year old or something. It just felt so good to have his Alpha's arms around him though. He was so weak, so inexcusably weak, but it was being offered, without judgment, without questions. Without restrictions or demands. If Dad was going to cuddle him like this, he was going to take it.

He wondered, were they now mates? He wanted to ask, but those words, like all words had lately, frozen in his mind before he could even shape his lips and gather his breath to speak them. He wanted to know- was his Alpha's protective presence, the tender way he'd automatically gather Dean to him whenever another Alpha walked into the room, was that a father caring for a broken son, or an Alpha caring for his hurt mate? He'd never acted like this in Dean's memory, not even the times Dean had been hurt to the point of hospitalization before. Did that mean that this was how Dad treated his mate?

But if that was the case, then why hadn't he made a move to claim Dean? The doctor had cleared Dean for intercourse days ago, but Dad hadn't so much as kissed Dean on the lips for all that they'd slept in the same bed every night since Dean had gotten out of the hospital. Maybe he didn't want a discarded, soiled Omega like Dean as a mate. Maybe he was tending to Dean out of pity and guilt. But then Dad squeezed him tight again and Dean thought he felt Dad's cock stir underneath him. Dad gave no sign that anything was different than a moment ago and Dean didn't know what to think. 

Dean finished the final sip of his protein shake and though Dad didn't tell him good job or anything like that, he did place his lips on Dean's temple and kiss him, briefly and lightly, sort of like you'd kiss a kid you were checking for fever.

"Hey, we've got to get back to work," Dad said. "We've got that tune up to finish and then there's the u-joint on the Robertson's car that I gotta get through before we go pick up Sam."

So he got up and followed his Dad back to the hood of the car they'd been working on before lunch. There wasn't any place else in the world he'd rather be at this moment than by the side of his Alpha. 

***

Dean's wires had been removed finally and they were transitioning him back to solid foods. John thought that if this broken jaw had come from any other cause, Dean would have dived head first into a burger or plate of pie regardless of what the doctors told him. As it was, Dean had simply graduated from protein shakes to soups and soft foods. 

Nor did Dean seem inclined to start speaking again. John did his best to be patient, knowing it was not his wheelhouse. He'd always been more of an explode in anger first, ask questions later kind of parent, but he knew that wasn't what Dean needed, that his anger would make Dean retreat more. What Dean needed was on the forefront of his mind these days. He wanted what was best for his young mate, because that was how he was starting to think of Dean. Even if they never spent a heat together, John didn't care. He'd grown to love the easy companionship of Dean at his side, working on cars together. He loved waking in the middle of the night and not finding himself alone in the bed, but instead finding that during the night he'd rolled onto his back and Dean had snuggled into his side, using John's arm or chest as a pillow. 

He'd realized he hadn't spent much time with Dean in the years leading up to the attack. Once he'd found he could get away with leaving Sam in Dean's care for days, even weeks at a time by the end, John had done it. Saving strangers and hunting things, hunting the particular thing that had taken his wife, had seemed so much more important than being there for his kids any more than minimum he could get away with. Dean had been so mature. There were times when Dean had seemed so much more of an adult than John had felt himself to be. Dean had never complained about taking care of Sam, never complained about anything, for that matter, other than John not treating him like the responsible, capable person he was. Other than that one time in Fort Douglas, Wisconsin, Sam had always been safe when Dean was on watch. And that hadn't been fair. He'd left them too long. He should have known that the thing he was hunting might hunt them. 

And if Dean had regressed after the attack, he deserved to be the one taken care of for the moment and John had found he loved to give Dean what he needed. That was what being an Alpha was really about, wasn't it? Being the strong one, taking care of one's Omega, of those who depended on you. He'd been almost unforgivably negligent. He thanked God every day now that he was getting his chance to make up for it. 

It was a Saturday morning in mid January, a week away from Dean's seventeenth birthday. He'd woken early, out of habit, Dean still fast asleep, head burrowed into the pillow he'd dragged over John's outstretched arm. He was beautiful, John's young mate. He had long lashes, curled and thick. A smattering of freckles spread out over his nose and cheeks. At rest, deeply asleep, his lax body was graceful. You could see the slight swell of his hips, not yet fully spread. He was too thin still, but over the past few weeks, they'd gotten more food into him and he'd lost the dire, famine survivor look. But his hips and ribs were prominent, his knees knobby. It added to the coltish look. 

Dean stirred, nothing that John had done, maybe just the ribbon of light that had slipped in under the roller shade and was painting brightness across the room. He thought about getting out of bed and pulling down the shade completely, but that would wake Dean even more. It was too late anyway. Dean was fully awake in a moment, and he was wrapping himself around John, all long limbs and neediness. 

"Morning, babe," John said, grinning at the way Dean was practically strangling him in a hug, arms around his neck. 

It wasn't until Dean started grinding his erect cock against John's hip, which was surprising in itself, that John caught the tentative, elusive scent of the early stages of a young Omega's heat. Sort of a pre-heat. The scent was delicious, sweet, fresh. It hinted at paradise and fulfillment. It promised bliss. People described it as floral, as sweet, but it wasn't really. It was its own scent but no less compelling because John couldn't pin down exactly what it smelled like. More than that, it was telling him to claim, to possess, to mate. If it were later in Dean's cycle or if he had less self-control, it would have been difficult to what he had, in all good conscience, to do next. Because he couldn't claim or mate Dean, not now.

Dean was about to go into heat, in the next twelve hours or so. There was still time to cut it off at the pass. It was sooner than John had expected. The doctor had said there was no way of predicting when Dean would get his next heat, between the irregular fits and starts of a young Omega's maturity and the added stress of the attack, it could come any time. She thought it would be later rather than sooner, that stress would delay it for six months maybe longer. She was wrong. It was here now. Not that he was unprepared. He'd made his decision for this particular moment weeks ago, the only one he could make.

John extricated himself from Dean's arms, saying, "I'll be right back."

He went into the bathroom, grabbed the heat suppressants from the medicine cabinet, stopping to grab a tumbler of water. The heat suppressants he hadn't had Dean start taking yet. It seemed like they'd just gotten Dean off a complicated medication schedule and he'd been sure there'd be time, that they wouldn't have to deal with Dean's heat for some time again. Once back in their bedroom, John stayed out of the bed. Instead, he held out the two pills and the water for Dean to take. 

"You gotta take these for me, Babe. You're going to go into heat unless we get you started on the suppressants right away," John said. Dean's expression clouded instantly. Living with Dean mute again had been a hard, sudden lesson in reading his face for the clues that he couldn't quite hide. "What's the matter, Dean?"

Dean scrabbled through the piles on the night stand for the little notebook he kept for those times when he wanted to communicate something more complex than could be handled by non-verbal communication, or by yes-no questioning. The doctors had thought he should take that notebook away, that he was just enabling Dean's refusal to talk. Maybe he was, but John knew it wasn't a refusal but an inability and he wouldn't take this away from Dean. 

Dean scrawled something quickly on the notebook and thrust it at John. 

'I thought we were mates now,' the notebook read. 

"If that's what you want, then we will be mates," John said. "But I'm not going to...I can't. Not when you can't even tell me no."

Dean just stared at him, eyes glazed with what looked like tears, threatening to overflow. That was something Dean hadn't done. He hadn't cried since the attack, not since a few, involuntary tears at the hospital that probably had more to do with physical pain than anything else.

"You're healing still. You're not ready for this, even if you do want it. We can be mates without sex. I can't claim you in that way, Dean. I couldn't stand it if you were hurt again, even just a little bit. You are my mate and I have to protect you. That's what being an Alpha means. So, please, take the pills and we can get into this later."

Tears did spill over Dean's eyes and ran down his cheeks. 

"I know, sweetheart," John said. "I know. It seems like I'm rejecting you. Pushing you away, but I'm doing this for you even if it hard to see that. I think you'll understand better when you're not swimming in hormones so much. The pre-heat makes it hard for both of us to think."

Dean held out his hand, nodded, accepting even if he wasn't happy about the only choice John was giving him at the moment. 

"I love you, Dean," John said. "I only want what's best for you. Period."

John put the pills and the glass of water into Dean's hands and watched as Dean took the pills. Then he climbed back into bed with his mate. He wrapped Dean in his arms and sniffed deeply of Dean's hair. He ignored his own hard on and held Dean as he cried. And it didn't taper off. It was like the way water seeped through a wall, first just a few drips, then the concealed force of it slowly wore away the resistance from the other side and eventually, it burst open with full force. Dean's tears were just a few, perfect drips on his face at the start, then there was a hitch in his breathing and before long, Dean was sobbing in John's arms. It just killed John that there was nothing he could do for Dean but hold him, rubbing his back in slow circles. These tears were long coming and shouldn't be stoppered up again. 

"I've gotcha," he whispered to Dean again and again, even though he knew that these tears were because this hadn't always been true. He hadn't been there for Dean when he had been needed most and a lifetime of making up for it wouldn't be enough. Eventually, Dean's sobbing tapered off, then he grew still and silent. His breathing slowed and deepened. Dean was falling back asleep. Maybe the best thing for him at this moment. By the time he woke up again, the heat suppressants would have started working and at least the heat symptoms would be gone, done. 

Sam was in the kitchen, helping himself to what looked like his second bowl of cereal, at least. The gallon of milk that had been new and full last night was halfway gone already. Yeah, this one was going to be Alpha for sure. 

Now that John was around and Dean just didn't have it in him to take care of anyone else right now, John was beginning to enjoy getting to know his youngest son. He was even enjoying being a father again. For years, Dean had been a kind of all in one parent to Sam, part mother, part father. John had seen that there'd been enough money, but that was all. Okay, most of the time they had enough money, and the times they hadn't, it was because John just didn't have any more. Maybe it was the selfish way to look at it, but now that John was around, he was beginning to see what he'd missed out on, being an absentee father.

"Where's Dean?" Sam asked. It sounded almost like an accusation. That was something he hadn't realized. Dean had always taken care of Sam, but there was reciprocation there. Sam had a deep, unshakeable love for Dean. There was a protectiveness that was coming out now that Dean was Omega and Sam seemed to get more and more like an Alpha and less like a child every day. 

"He fell back asleep," John said. "Don't disturb him. He needs the sleep."

Sam nodded his understanding and went back to eating his cereal. John applied himself to the business of making coffee and tackling the few dishes left over from the night before. Once the dishes were in the rack, drying and the coffee maker had burbled its last, John poured himself a cup. Black, no sugar. That was long ingrained habit. On the road you couldn't get fussy about your caffeine source and it didn't do to get hooked on milk or sugar, because you didn't know when you wouldn't be able to get it. Then he poked through the newspaper, again, long habit. He always read the paper, looking for patterns where other wouldn't see them, hints of case, clues that maybe a demon had passed through. He blinded himself purposefully now when he read the paper. There would be no more hunting, not for now. Not when he had to take care of his Omega. Not when his mate had to be his primary consideration. 

Sam was reading over several pages of hand writing on blue lined pages that had obviously been torn straight out of a spiral bound notebook. They still had the jaggedy perforated edge. The writing was loopy and decorated here and there with little hearts and smiley faces, the sure hallmarks of a grade school girl's handwriting. Did Sam have a little girl friend somewhere? Was this some kind of mash note from her? He certainly seemed to be grinning as he read. 

Then John looked closer at his son and realized that it wasn't the pleased, goofy grin of a little boy in his first crush, but a grim, hard kind of grin. It wasn't love. It was pure schadenfreude, an expression disconcerting on a boy so young. 

"What've you got there, son?" he asked.

"It's a letter from Layla. Friend from one of my old schools," Sam said. 

This was, no doubt, technically true, but it didn't illuminate what was going on in Sam's mind right now. John tried to remember any mention of a Layla before and realized he didn't have any idea of any of his son's friends from any of the many schools he'd been at over the years. 

"Which school would that be?" John asked, mildly. 

"My last school before this one. She's not a girlfriend or anything like that," Sam said, defensively. "Just a friend."

"Of course," John said, then pretended to put all his attention back into the newspaper. He was a little ashamed to use such obvious reverse psychology on his son, but it worked. 

A moment later, Sam burst out with, "She was just telling me about some weird things that are happening to the football team. Bad things."

"What sort of weird, bad things?" John asked, instantly piqued in spite of himself. Weird, bad things were pretty much his thing. Had been his thing. 

"Not like our kind of weird bad," Sam said. "Like they lost the state championship because the quarterback got in a car accident the day before and he couldn't play. They're saying he lost his balls. Ripped 'em right off."

John couldn't help but wince at the mere thought of that. "Sam, were you raised to take pleasure in the misfortune of others?"

"Dad, it's Deke Kaczinski. On the football team," Sam said, his voice high and quavery with feeling. When John didn't respond, Sam said, "He hurt Dean. Dad, he was the one raping Dean when I walked in the locker room."

Then John was torn, because honestly, it couldn't happen to a more deserving guy, but on the other hand, were they so inhuman as to wish that on anyone? He was hardly one to speak on vengeance, but it was an inhuman monster he'd sought, not a fellow human. John would have been satisfied if the justice system had done its work properly. 

"Anything else happen?" John asked. "You said bad things."

"Mike Morton, he was on the football team too. He broke his jaw an' they wired it shut, just like Dean's. But they say Mike went to this party and drank a lot. When he threw it up, he choked on his own throw up. They couldn't find the wire cutters to cut his jaw open and he was dead by the time the ambulance got there."

Well, it wasn't surprising that a teenager might drink until he got ill, but then no one being able to find the wire cutters? The doctors had made it quite clear that Dean should carry his own wire cutters constantly, even though they should be used in only a true emergency. Dean had thrown up plenty of times without a major problem while his jaw had been wired shut. Maybe the boy had been so passed out drunk that he'd aspirated the liquid vomit while he'd been lying on his back?

"Anything else?" John asked.

"It's just a rumor, but Layla says that Drew Cargill broke his penis. He an' a cheerleader were having sex and it just snapped. They say he lost his knot."

"He was on the football team too?" John asked and Sam nodded solemnly.

It wasn't that there was a bone in the human penis to break, John knew, but the fibrous coverings of the erectile tissue could rupture. An Alpha's knot could be vulnerable to this as well, especially during athletic, aggressive Omega or female on top sex. If the rupture was bad enough, not even surgery could save the knot sometimes. 

As John was thinking, Sam continued, "An' Marcus Owens on the football team turned out to be an Omega. He was hiding with suppressants and no one knew until he got pregnant and he lost the baby."

All of these things were misfortunate and looked at individually, assuming they were true, weren't anything unusual, certainly not supernatural. But taken together, it seemed like ill luck was stalking the members of the football team. If he came across those four incidents alone, normally, that would be enough to get John to investigate. It was almost certainly a hunt, something supernatural was at work. Part of him had an urge to pull up roots and head back to that small Illinois town. 

But the rest of him thought about how he'd held a shaking, sobbing Dean just an hour ago, how broken Dean had been. How his baby boy hadn't even been able to speak since he was attacked. He thought about how Dean had nearly died from complications due to the attack. John knew that a better man would be able to look past all that and help those who needed it. A better man knew that an eye for an eye was barbaric. A better man would know that his attackers being broken wouldn't make Dean whole again. 

John had never had it in him to be a better man. 

"It's only fair," Sam said. "It's justice. They're getting what they deserve."

There was something in the way Sam said that, a possessive pride, like he was owning these acts. 

"What did you do, Sam?" John demanded. 

Even though Sam now knew the truth about monsters and how John fought them, they tried to keep him innocent of some of it still, the worst of it. It never had occurred to John that his son would seek the supernatural out, draw on its powers in some way. And that was the thing John had feared most, the hint he'd gotten, that the demon had been in that room for Sam and Mary had just gotten in the way. He feared that the demon had been there to corrupt Sam, turn him to the dark side. Had Sam drawn on some dark magic for vengeance, and if so, how?

"Mrs. Burke knew a witch, and she gave me this necklace. She said it would wake up justice if I put it on the statue on the courthouse lawn," Sam said. "I did.

"Necklace? Like with a amulet on it?" John demanded. 

"Like a coin on a chain," Sam said. "I made a rubbing."

So Sam dug through his school bag and pulled out an old notebook, flipped through the pages, until he came across a careful pencil rubbing of what looked to be an old coin. Even from rubbing, the thing looked ancient. Sam had done both sides. One side depicted an old balance scales. In one of the pans of the scale was a feather, in the other, a human heart. The other side was a winged goddess. Not Greco-Roman as John had somehow been expecting, but Egyptian. And that made John even more afraid than before. The old Egyptian gods seemed to have a power to them that had hardly faded now that now that no one believed in them. He had recognized the Goddess instantly- Maat. The feather was in the scale was hers, from her wings. She was a goddess of justice far older and more dire than either the Greek or the Roman version.

"Sam..." John started.

"They're only getting what they deserve," Sam said, anger in his voice. "You weren't doing anything. I had to."

"Sam, I'm protecting, Dean. I'm taking care of him," John said, but Sam was right. John should have gone after the Alphas who had hurt Dean, his Omega. He should have sought his vengeance and he hadn't. He should have pounded them into the ground. He should have beaten them to a pulp. It was just that it had seemed more important at the time to be there for Dean. "Sam, it's not your place. I did what I thought was right and Dean is mine to protect."

But even though he should have done something, he didn't discipline Sam much. He didn't take those rubbings from Sam's notebooks. Maybe if he heard of incidents beyond the small town they'd just left, he might do something. Maybe he should call Bobby Singer and have him look into it. 

"I know why you did it, Sam, and I know why you thought it was the right thing, but we don't use the magic we learn about. It's just too easy to make the wrong call. Most hoodoo, witchcraft, whatever, it's dark side. It's power comes from demons. It's not that there's no good magic, but it's rare."

He didn't tell Sam that the goddess he'd called on had the hearts that weighed heavier than that feather of hers thrown to the crocodile goddess Ammit, sort of a post judgment snack. The souls became restless spirits, the kind he'd spent so much time putting down. 

"Nobody's getting anything they don't deserve," Sam protested. 

"That isn't for you to decide, Sam, who deserves what. We protect people, even when we think they don't deserve it. That's what we've always done," John said. "Go on to your room. Do your homework. I'm sure you got some."

It was only after Sam brushed past him that John realized that Dean had been standing in the doorway to the kitchen, listening to them. Dean looked over his shoulder at Sam disappearing into his bedroom with his school backpack, then turned back to John and spoke the first words he'd spoken in far too long. 

"'s not a punishment," Dean said, obviously about sending Sam to his room with a pile of books. John felt like running up to Dean, wrapping him in his arms and swinging him around the room, celebrating the mere fact that Dean had spoken again. He pushed the urge down. It'd probably spook Dean back into silence. 

"I know," John said. "I just wanted to get him out of the way so I could call Bobby Singer. And to end the argument. Twelve is far too young for him to act as Alpha as he does."

Dean shrugged. John knew what he was thinking. Just as Dean had had to act as a parent because John was absent, so Sam had had to act like an Alpha once Dean had started to show signs of presenting as Omega. He shouldn't have had to do that, become precociously mature, emotionally, even if it wasn't reflected in his small body. Both his sons had been so mature, so resourceful. He'd taken it as something to be proud of. He'd thought it a sign of how much better his sons were than other children their age that he could leave them alone in motel for over a week and they were fine when he got back. He'd never before thought of his sons' early maturity as a result of his failings as a father and an Alpha. 

"Things are going to be different now, Dean," John said. "I'm here. I'm not going to leave you and Sam again. I can't guarantee that the hunt won't follow us here, but I'm not going out looking for it again."

To tell the truth, the longer it had been since he'd actively sought out a hunt, the less urgency it had, the less importance. He'd set out to find revenge for Mary. Her loss had been like a fire burning him from the inside. But now? Every day since Dean had been attacked, it was like that fire had dwindled, first to coal, now, to ashes that were still hot. Dean was his priority, the only thing that really mattered to him at the moment. Mary's death had hollowed out his insides, but every time he looked at Dean now, he was little more solid, a little more filled up and filled out. 

Dean was standing in front of him, hair sleep mussed and green eyes sleepy, rimmed with red from his earlier tears. The odor of his heat still lingered- fresh, sweet and enticing, though he could tell it wasn't an active heat. Dean was beautiful, John noticed. His eyes were lined with thick, smoky lashes and his mouth was pink and lush. He'd changed out his own clothes for one of John's shirts, one he'd worn earlier in the week. Dean had rolled up the sleeves so they didn't cover his hands, but the shirt mostly swamped Dean's too slender form. The huge shirt made him look delicate. Looking at him in it woke all kinds of tender protectiveness in John. 

"You feel better?" John asked, meaning, was he still bothered by the early symptoms of the heat?

Dean nodded, but he wrapped his arms around his middle. Stomach pain was one of the possible side effects of the suppressants Dean had been prescribed, especially when taken on an empty stomach. 

"You want some food? I could make my famous kitchen sink soup for lunch today." 

Dean grimaced. So, no to the spicy hot chili based soup that was good for all ills as far as John was concerned. Better than chicken soup. 

"I think Sam ate all the Lucky Charms again," John said. He gave the box Sam had left on the table an experimental shake and it sounded all but empty. 

***

Dean didn't know why the stricture in his throat, in his voice, that had been keeping him from talking, even though he'd wanted to, had lifted. But he'd woken up from his short nap after his embarrassing bout of tears feeling lighter, feeling like the tears had washed away some of the dirtiness he'd felt constantly since his attack. 

At first, when Dad, his Alpha, had refused to take him in his heat, Dean thought he was going to die from the shame of it. Not even his father wanted a spoiled, broken Omega like he was. He was too soiled by those other Alphas. And Dean had been broken hearted because Dad, he smelled like a mate. Good. Strong. Safe. More than that. He'd smelled just right. Desirable. Just the scent of him was making Dean feel all those things that he knew he should have felt the first time he'd gotten his heat and been given pain and humiliation instead. Dean had never wanted so much in his short life. The denial of his want made him despair. 

Then Dad had said, "You can't even say no to me," and Dean knew it wasn't because he wasn't wanted. He was being protected. His Alpha wasn't going do what those other Alphas had. He hadn't known if he should feel relief, because he was scared of how much he'd wanted and scared of what could happen if he got what he wanted. Or if he should grieve, because this would never be as simple as it could have been. He would always be tainted by what had happened to him. He would always remember that his first heat had been bloody, stolen from him. It was confusion, more than anything, that had made him cry, so many conflicting emotions all at once, all swirling around in his head, making him dizzy with their demands. When Alpha had given him the pills, he'd only had a vague idea of what he was taking, though he knew now that it was a heat suppressant and he was glad he'd been given it, because he wanted to be sure Dad was truly his Alpha, truly his mate, before he went through that again. 

 

After he'd taken the pills, Dad had spoken to him, but Dean hadn't really heard it. All he knew was that Dad had taken him into his arms and held him as he cried. That he was safe. Protected. 

He'd fallen asleep. Cried himself to sleep and when he woke, he was alone in the bed. But not really alone. The scent of his mate, his Alpha was all around him. He'd wanted to wrap himself up completely in that scent and when he'd seen the work shirt on the floor next to the laundry basket, it was instinct to pick it up and wrap himself up in its generous folds of denim. It was huge on him. The sleeves hung to his finger tips. He was enveloped in Alpha scent- reassuring, strong. Potent. 

Dean could hear Sam and Dad talking in the other room. He slipped own his boxers on under the big shirt and wandered to the kitchen. As he came to the door frame, he was just in time to hear Sam be chastised for something hunt related.

"That isn't for you to decide, Sam, who deserves what. We protect people, even when we think they don't deserve it. That's what we've always done," John said. "Go on to your room. Do your homework. I'm sure you got some."

Dean thought of how much Sam loved school and how much he loved to be alone with his books, given a chance to read and work. Somehow, the block in his throat that stopped him from talking, even when he wanted to wasn't there. He could talk, so he said, "That's not a punishment."

His voice sounded creaky, barely audible. He was surprised that it was there at all. It felt like it'd been so long since he used it that he had to have lost it completely, forever. It was still hard to talk. The next couple of questions, he only was able to nod, to gesture his answer like he'd gotten used to. Dad could read him easy. 

Until Dad shook the nearly empty box of Lucky Charms and said, "I think Sam ate all the Lucky Charms again."

Dean hadn't had so much as a single bowl from this box or the previous three, for that matter. "He always does," Dean said. 

"You spoil him. He should have had a little brother so he learned to share," Dad said. 

Dean pictured himself pregnant. Him and his dad making a baby. They could have been been making that baby right now if circumstances were different. They could be joined together by his Alpha's knot. The sheets around them could be soaked with sweat and slick. His Alpha could be filling him with come, planting a baby in him. He thought about a baby, how it'd start so small and grow inside him. He felt kind of an aching and yearning in his belly. He could feel something inside clench and move. 

Dad kind of sniffed and said, "You might need to take another dose of the suppressant for it to shut everything down."

"I want a baby," Dean said, surprising himself. If you'd asked him a couple months ago, that would have been the last thing on his mind, but apparently his body had a whole new agenda, one that the suppressant drugs wasn't really helping with. "I could give Sam a little brother."

"I think it's too soon to be talking about that. Plenty of time. You're still only seventeen."

A lot of Omegas caught with their first baby at his age or even much younger. Just yesterday, they'd met one of Sam's friend's Omega parent. He was only twenty-five and his kid was twelve, like Sam was. And he'd had a double stroller with a four year old, a two year old and he was pregnant. He was picking up a six year old and an eight year at school as well as Sam's friend. He'd seemed so happy, smiling and laughing at his large brood. He'd offered to take Sam home with him, saying that six kids for dinner wasn't any more work than five. "Besides, you probably want to spend some time alone with your Omega," he'd said. 

Maybe Dean didn't want a kid every other year, but he wanted a family, a couple of kids at least. He wanted them settled in a house somewhere, with Dad and Sam. He remembered how mom took care of him, with cut off crusts and kisses to the forehead and lots of hugs. He still, all these years later, missed that. It might be too late for him to get that, but he could be the one to do the taking care. He could cut off crusts and kiss boo boos. He could even learn to make pie. He thought it wouldn't matter to a baby that he'd been ruined. It was more than that. He thought it was a way he could take back his body from the Alphas who raped him. They'd treated him like he was some kind of garbage can they could dump their unwanted jizz in. If he had a baby, he'd be using his body to hold something good, something really good. Deciding to make a baby would be using his body in a way of his choosing, taking come into his self in a way he wanted, like it was something good and not some toxic thing. 

"Want a baby now. With you, Alpha," Dean said. "I want to know that it can be good between Alphas and Omegas. I need this. Please, Alpha."

***

John could hardly believe his ears. His boy was begging for a baby. Begging for it to be given to him now. Not that he would be able to give Dean a baby right now. He had, after all, taken the heat suppressant pills and though they hadn't quite shut Dean's heat down yet, it should be working soon, even without a second dose. They would certainly prevent conception. 

The phone rang and not certain what the hell he was going to say to Dean, John picked up the call, an easy out. 

"Hello, is this John Winchester?" the voice on the other end of the line asked. It was deep, sure. Obviously another Alpha, but not one John recognized. 

"This is," John said, tight lipped for the moment, not sure who'd be calling, asking for him. Only a few people in the world had this number- his boss, the school, Bobby and Pastor Jim. 

"This is Cyrus Weisel. James' dad. Your son Sam's friend. Look, I hate to bother you on a Saturday, but James has just been bugging us to have Sam over for a sleepover. I know my Omega asked you yesterday and you brushed him off."

The implication was clear. The Alpha was asking if his Omega had been brushed off, just because he was an Omega. A lot of Alphas might not take an invitation to the family home seriously if it was issued by an Omega. John vaguely remembered being asked about Sam sleeping over, but he'd said no because he always said no to that sort of thing. But they were putting down roots here, at least for now. Yes, Sam had to be protected, but he couldn't stand out either, and attract too much attention. It would give him time alone with Dean, who clearly needed it, even if they didn't end up having sex at this time. 

"I'm sorry," he said. "My mind was elsewhere yesterday. I hope your Omega didn't think I was rude. It's just I've never really allowed Sam to sleep over anywhere before. I suppose I'm going to have to let go sometime. He is twelve already."

"So, is tonight good for your family? Danny thought you and your Omega might be needing some time together this weekend."

John knew it was considered a kindness to offer to take the older kids for a day or so if you smelled that a heat was pending. Of course, reciprocation was expected. Now that they were going to be here for a while, they'd have to pay attention to these rules of etiquette. He pictured them with all of Sam's friend's siblings running around the house and he couldn't help but smile a little at the thought of a large and noisy household around him. He'd wanted that once, but the chance had been stolen from him, then he'd denied it to himself in favor of vengeance. 

"I'd truly appreciate that," he said, even though Dean wouldn't be going into heat. They still needed the time alone. "We'd truly appreciate it, Dean and I."

Arrangements were made. Sam was prepared, armed with silver and salt, but warned against bringing it out except at true need. Dean, meanwhile, had fallen to cleaning their little apartment with a vengeance. It was nesting behavior and meant that the suppressant pills weren't working all that well, but John hadn't been able to convince Dean to take a second dose. 

Soon enough, John had dropped Sam off at his friend's house, a once grand mansion fallen on shabbier days, but not cut into apartments like so many previously good houses had been in this neighborhood. John had been surprised to see one of the more obscure variations of Solomon's keys inlaid as a pattern into the parquet floor of the foyer. Cyrus caught him looking at it and shrugged, "We're not Satanists or anything like that. Best we can figure, the house's original builder was a Mason or something like that. It's a traditional symbol for protection. Danny won't let me replace it. Thinks its our good luck charm or something."

But the willfully, cheerfully ignorant act was just a front. John could tell that Cyrus was looking at him carefully, seeing how he reacted to the devil's trap, so John stepped backwards, out of the trap, indicating clearly that he wasn't trapped by it. Then, as he looked all around, he could suddenly see, here and there, but all over, symbols of protection. An aquarian star on the door. A prominent crucifix on the wall. A holy water font. There had been a mezuzah on the door frame. 

"A real alphabet soup of symbols, I know," Weisel said. "I'm Jewish, Danny is Catholic."

"My family doesn't really follow any of the formal religions," John said. "But Sam has been exposed to a bit of everything you can imagine."

The builder of this house hadn't been a Mason but one of the Men of Letters. John thought with an ache of his missing father, who'd been a Man of Letters, something John hadn't even known about until long after he'd grown up. They'd been powerful, but very occult, in the sense of hidden. Then about the time his father had disappeared, the rest of them had as well. He'd only found the barest hints about the order and he wasn't even a hundred percent sure his father had been one of them, but John remembered clearly a few pieces of jewelry left behind that had the Aquarian star on them. Either way, John was satisfied to leave Sam here for the night. With that Solomon's Key on the floor, there was no way anyone in the house was a demon and at least they wouldn't be getting in the front door. No doubt there were other wards and protections at the other entrances. 

"Thanks for taking him for the night," John said. "It's truly appreciated."

"Not a problem. I can pretty much smell your Omega's heat on you," Cyrus said. 

"We tried a dose of the suppressants but they don't seem to be doing much good," John admitted. "It's not really the best time for it."

"Sometimes, when an Omega wants a baby bad enough, not all the suppressants in the world are enough to shut it down. And if you wait for the right time to have a baby, you might just wait forever," Cyrus said. "I'll let you get back to him."

"Just a moment alone with Sam and I'll leave," John said. When he was left alone in the hallway with his youngest son, he said, "Remember everything we talked about on the way over about your manners and things. And remember, you're not off the hook. We're still going to have a big talk about taking things into your own hands and how I'm Dean's Alpha, not you. This overnight isn't a reward for your behavior. It's only because Dean and I need to spend time alone together."

Sam wrinkled his nose and frowned. "I really do not need to hear you breeding my brother," he said. 

"Language, Sam," John said. "And if Dean and I do conceive a child sometime, I think it'll do you a world of good to be the older brother for once."

Sam launched himself suddenly at John's midsection, hugged him tight. Though he didn't act like it often these days, John was reminded that Sam was still very much his little boy, not yet the Alpha he tried to act like. Yeah, it was pretty obvious that he would become Alpha, and the statistics were with him, but there was also still not insignificant chances that he'd present as Omega. But for now, he was a little boy, not differentiated. A little boy that had never gone on a sleepover at anyone's house, who'd barely had time to make friends good enough for that kind of thing. He whispered at John's waist, "Take good care of him, Dad."

"I will. I promise. And if you want to come home, you need to come home for any reason, you call and I'll come," John said, aware that until recently, Dean had been Sam's world, pretty much. He ruffled his son's hair one last time and let him to his sleepover. 

Back at home, Dean had the place cleaned to within an inch of it's life. Cleaner than when they'd moved in for sure. Dean himself was sleeping on the sofa, arm over his eyes. He was still wearing John's workshirt. 

The workshirt and nothing else but little white socks, actually. It'd ridden up as he napped and John could see his otherwise naked body. His legs were slightly spread and John caught a glimpse of the pink, damp flesh between Dean's legs, a hint of the vulva and vagina that had opened up when Dean had presented. John hadn't really seen it before. John had been careful to stand up by Dean's head during the numerous exams he'd had since the attack. He'd known that Dean had been torn up down there. It seemed someplace where Dean was so vulnerable, so soft, but from this angle, John couldn't see any scarring, just the enticing mystery of it, mostly hidden by soft brown hair and Dean's male sex parts. 

John must have made some small noise because Dean snapped awake, sitting up instantly and automatically reaching under the sofa cushion. Dean had taken to sleeping with a knife under his pillow and John hadn't discouraged him, even though he shouldn't have to use it. He should be able to depend on the Alpha he was sleeping with to protect him. 

"Just me," John said, not stepping closer yet. Dean shook his head, clearing the sleep away. "I'm back from dropping off Sammy. He'll be fine for the night."

Dean stood up and walked over to John, the shirt slipping down into place again, covering him up. The shirt which came down to John's hips went nearly to Dean's mid thigh. "Alpha," he whispered as John slipped his arms around Dean's shoulders and pulled him close. "I want you. That's why you let Sam spend the night at his friends, isn't it? So we can have the night alone together."

"Yeah," John said, placing a soft kiss on the top of Dean's head. The heat scent hadn't diminished any in the time he'd been gone. He thought about Cyrus' words, that if the Omega wanted it badly enough, there weren't enough suppressants to stop it. Dean wanted this and it was John's duty to give it to him. But more than that, to make it good for him, the best.  
"You and me. Wanted to have plenty of time to make it good for you. Love you so much, babe. Want you to know that I'd want this even if it weren't for your heat. Even if it weren't my duty. I love you."

He ran his hand down Dean's jaw. The surgeons had done a good job setting it, because John couldn't feel anything different than it had ever been. When John had broken his jaw, he'd ended up with, not exactly a knot, but a spot where you could feel where the break had been. Dean, at least on the outside, had healed perfectly. 

"You tell me if you're even a little uncomfortable," John said. "If you're even a little scared."

Then he placed his lips tentatively on Dean's. Dean gasped, then softened in his arms, opening his mouth for John. He pulled Dean closer and continued kissing him, tenderly, gently. But there was a building heat between them, causing Dean to try and pull himself closer, whimpering just a little as he thrust his hips up against John's thigh. 

"Easy," John said. "I'll see you get what you need. I promise. No need to go fast. Let's get you to the bedroom."

He picked up Dean and carried him into the bedroom, one arm under his knees, the other under Dean's shoulders. He thought about carrying Mary across the threshold to their first home together. He and Dean needed to get a home together, a real one, not a dinky little apartment, but one with room for the children that would be no doubt coming, if not now, then very soon. A home that Dean chose. Before that, if Dean wanted it, a formal claiming ceremony. The informal claiming, in some ways the one that mattered, that was happening now.

"Dean?" John asked. "You want this, right? You want me to claim you as my Omega. You want me to make love to you and maybe put a baby in you. I need to hear you say it."

"Yes, Alpha, please!" Dean said. "Want to be your mate. Want your babies."

So John laid Dean out on the bed and laid next to him. He unbuttoned the work shirt, revealing Dean, hiding nothing. He didn't take the socks off and Dean didn't move to either. He looked so sweetly sexy like that, lying on his Alpha's shirt, little white footie socks making him seem even more naked than he would have been without them. John palmed his erection through his jeans, adjusting it a little so it was more comfortable, but he didn't free it from his clothes as much as he yearned to. There was a lot of work before he could even think about his own pleasure. He nudged Dean's legs open and knelt between them. He ran his hands down Dean's thighs, light touch at first, and Dean trembled a little at first, but then his breathing slowed and his eyes met John's. They were unfocused at first, but he seemed to become more aware of John. He was asking for this with that look and then he spoke. 

"Don't make me wait forever," Dean said. "I'm gonna be okay."

"You're going to be more than okay," John said. "I promise."

So he laid down between Dean's open thighs. He placed his lips on the pale flesh of Dean's inner thighs. Even though Dean was eating again, he was still too thin. Once Dean had been a sturdy boy. Now he was slender still, though their walks every day had put some muscle back onto him. John spent a long time, just kissing those thighs, up and down, close to Dean's pussy, but not actually touching it. He catalogued every sigh, every shiver of pleasure, noting that Dean tensed at anything even approaching a bite, even the tiniest of nibbles, but lips and tongues, kisses and licks, brought him sighs of pleasure. A tongue line up his inner thigh tendon brought a moan. Only when Dean was squirming and grabbing at his hair did John move in closer, more intimately, sniffing and licking Dean's pussy, but not even fingering him yet. Dean's cock was just so pretty, John thought. It was nearly the length of an Alpha's cock, but it was slender, beautifully shaped, no knot, nor the loose skin at the base where a knot could inflate. Erect, it sprang from a bush of curled brown hair, curved in an arc up to his belly. The tip was pink, the rest a dark, dusky pink. His balls, small and compact, pulled up tight and revealed the deep pink labia hidden among the cloud of Dean's pubic hair.

"Do something," Dean pleaded. "You're driving me crazy."

The lips of his labia glistened with generous amounts of slick and the sweet, musky scent of Dean's heat, unconquered by modern medicine, filled the bedroom. John swallowed down Dean's cock, intending to go slowly engulfing it inches at a time. But Dean shook as soon as John took the head into his mouth and then he was coming, flooding John's mouth and soaking the bed underneath them with copious slick. 

Dean sighed and fell back against the bed, but his erection didn't flag. Ah, to be young and be an Omega. Dean could probably go again and again. Properly aroused and paid attention to in all the right ways, an Omega could go for hours without being fucked out. Because Dean was probably a little sensitive at the moment, John let his sweet little cock slip out of his mouth. 

"That's a good start," John said. "Is the edge off for now?"

He ignored his own erection. It'd be better for waiting, he thought. And they needed time for intimacy before they could even attempt intercourse, much less knotting. If knotting was even on the table right now. Dean sighed with what sounded like happiness. John laid himself on the bed beside Dean, then rolled them both over so that Dean laid on top of him so that Dean could grind against him. 

"So, tell me about the family you want us to have," John said, resting his hands on Dean's hips. "How many babies?"

"Three, maybe," Dean said. "Not all right now. Just the one to start. I. I don't know if you want to let me, but I want to finish school. I want."

Then Dean buried his face into John's chest, bashful, scared of John's reaction to what he was going to say next. What could it be that Dean thought John would hate so much, get angry at? Of course Dean was going to finish school. Even with a baby they'd work things out. There was money and that made things easier.

"Hey, whatever it is you want, we'll make it happen," John said, tracing the bare rack of Dean's spine lightly with his fingers. "Tell me what you want."

"Don't want to go into the family business. Don't want to hunt. I want to go to college. I wanna be a nurse. I can still save people. In the hospital, when I was in the ICU, the nurses, they didn't just take care of me. They saved me. I mean, I know there were doctors and you came as often as they let you. But the nurses, they were always there. They made me better. I could do that. I know you want me to fix cars with you and hunt things and I can."

John thought of the days he'd been spending lately with Dean under the hood of some car or another. It'd been their thing, the way they'd stayed communicating. And the way that he'd let Dean know things were the same even though they'd changed so much. But he wouldn't have wanted Dean to have to do it for a living except by choice. It was hard, physical work, dirty and sometimes dangerous. If there was something better that Dean wanted, of course John wanted that for him.

"We'll make it happen," John said. "You want to be a nurse, then you will."

"But you're going to get back to hunting soon, aren't you? You need me for that."

The thought of taking his Omega on a hunt made John feel physically ill, like he was going to throw up. He should have felt that way about taking his son on a hunt too, John thought. He knew he hadn't been a good father, hadn't done the things he should have. He could see that now, like a cloud had been lifted from his vision. Or like the last nine years had been a fever dream that he was just now waking from. 

"I'm done with hunting," John said. "I'll still protect us if something comes looking, but I can't, not any more. You're my mate. Taking care of you is my priority."

Dean wrapped his arms tightly around John's chest and squeezed, the smashed his lips against John, more eager than skilled. John remembered that they were meant to be making love. His cock ached and at Dean's enthusiastic embraces, it twitched and jumped. Dean's hand found its way to John's zipper and tugged and yanked, trying to free John's cock from its confines. John helped him out, getting the belt undone for him and the top button, letting Dean pull the zipper down. Then he scooted and wriggled until he was free of both jeans and boxers, his erect cock springing free. The knot was already forming at the base, just a little bit of swelling. He tried to think about other things, baseball scores, anything to dampen his arousal a little. He couldn't be like other Alphas and just hammer a semi inflated knot into his Omega.

John slipped a hand between Dean's legs, sliding his fingers through the generously slicked lips of Dean's pussy. He was so wet, ready for this, in some ways at least. John searched for the entrance. One finger to start he thought, and pushed inside. Dean's cunt was warm and so soft. Dean's eyes opened wide and his whole body stiffened. He started breathing fast, the sound of panic, John thought, and he tried to pull his finger out immediately. He'd have to rethink this. There was no way that Dean was ready for this, not now. Not for a knot, certainly. But Dean clamped his legs together, trapping John's hand between his legs. Dean's face had gone from startled rabbit to dead calm certain in just a few seconds. 

"I'm fine," Dean said. "Don't you dare. I was just a little surprised, but I'm good and I need this."

"Dean, sweetheart," John pleaded. "We don't have to do this now. You don't have to prove anything to anyone. There's plenty of time to have a baby later."

"I said, I need this. Not trying to prove anything, just need it. Need to know that it can be good. I need to know it's something that can be given to me, not taken from me. I trust you, Alpha."

"Okay," John said, a little staggered that Dean, still, despite everything, had an unswerving trust in him. He prayed that he was worthy of it. Dean's thighs released their clamp on his hand. John pushed into the hot, wet, velvety warmth again. He groaned. If it felt so amazing just sticking his finger in, how unspeakably wonderful would it be to bury his knot in there. They were a long way from a knot though. One finger was tight. He curled his finger, seeking Dean's prostate, at the same time, grinding Dean's and his hips together, so that the boy got friction on his cock. Dean got the hint there soon and he began working his hips against John on his own, controlling the pace and intensity. They kissed too, Dean's lips soft against him at first, then more confident, but still there was a base tenderness there that John thought would never go away. 

John felt giddy almost, light hearted, but intense. He was felt young again somehow, like he was a kid making out with one of his boyfriends. But there was also a seriousness to this as well. There was a great weight to this occasion, a sense that it was the start of something big, and also that he was letting go of a huge burden, one he had hardly been aware he was carrying until he stood up straight and realized he was no longer bowed under it. 

Sometime later, a second finger slipped inside Dean easily as his cunt got sloppy wet with slick. Dean sighed with pleasure and bore down even harder on John's hand, working himself now. "Feels so good," he said. "Need more. Please, Alpha?"

But John controlled their pace, not giving in to Dean's importuning, knowing that if he went too fast, even if Dean thought he wanted it, he might ruin the whole thing. They were skating on a very thin edge and the opportunity for just more trauma laid on either side of it. Someone, one of the doctors, had told him that Dean was more resilient than John thought, he just needed to give Dean a chance. Even so, John wasn't taking his chances. He dwelled on Dean's deep green eyes, not just because he loved to see them, because he loved to see the devotion he had mirrored there, but because he knew he'd see the instant Dean slipped out of the present moment and into a memory of pain and assault. 

Good, he was so beautiful, his Omega. When had Dean drifted from being a cute kid to into being an absolutely gorgeous man? Those eyelashes of his were killer, smoky and long. The smattering of freckles across his nose made John want to plant a kiss on each one, so he started. Dean laughed once he realized what John was doing. 

John forced them to keep to their leisurely pace of lovemaking, even though he ached to just sink his cock into Dean's pussy. Eventually though, what seemed like hours, Dean shifted, canted his hips and pressed his cunt against John's cock, rubbing against it, riding John's cock but not letting it inside just yet. Maybe he was still seeking the right spot. It was incredible, the feeling of Dean's skin against his cock. John ran his hands up and down Dean's slim hips and down to the ivory skin of Dean's thighs. They were perfect, John thought, Dean's legs, slender, but muscled. 

"Are you sure?" John asked. Dean nodded, then he sank down. John had worked him open so well and gotten him so slick that John just slid right in right up to his knot, which had formed a while back, despite his best efforts to control his arousal. Dean tried to force himself further down, tried to make the knot pop in. 

"It won't go in all the way," Dean complained, writhing and squirming, in a way that was breath taking for John, but that he knew was born of frustration, not desire.

"Shush, sweetheart," John said, putting steadying hands on Dean's hips. "It's okay. It doesn't have to go in. I don't have to knot you to mate you and I don't have to knot you to put a baby in you. Just ride me. Just do what feels good and it'll be just right for right now."

"But you can't come without the knot in me."

Is that what he thought? John supposed it was a common enough tale, one that some Alphas weren't in a hurry to correct, because it did feel better to come with your knot buried deep into an Omega. But there'd be a hell of a lot of sexually frustrated Alphas if it were true. John had come buried deep like that only a few times in his life, and far, far more times without. There was jerking off, of course. And most women, including Mary, weren't able to tolerate the knot without pain. They just weren't built for it like Omegas were. If Dean weren't able to take the knot right now, that was fine with John. He was well experienced in someone riding on top of his knot, not around it.

"Sweetheart, if that were true, no Alpha could ever jerk off," John said. "No Alpha could make love to a woman. It doesn't matter if it doesn't go in this time or ever."

Dean's eyes grew wide a moment in surprise, but then he nodded and lowered his body so that they were touching chest to chest. He wrapped his arms around John's neck and buried his face into John's neck. They moved together. John encouraged Dean to move with hands on his hips and in time to that, he gently moved in and out of Dean. 

Soon, Dean was breathing heavily and needing no encouragement to drive his hips up and and down, grinding against John, obviously finding his own sweet spot. His face was utterly serious and focused on chasing his bliss. He was quiet other than his breathing. John slipped a hand in between them, seeking Dean's cock. It felt so amazing, being sheathed in the warm, wet body of his Omega, the friction from Dean rubbing against his knot. He knew he wasn't going to last long, so he wanted to be sure Dean got off before him. He moved his hand on Dean's cock in time to his thrusts and before long, he was rewarded with Dean's feral cry and and a burst of wetness on his hand. 

Dean's cunt grabbed tight, trying to tie with the knot that wasn't inside of him, and that was enough to milk the come out of him. He was crying out almost before he felt his body tense up and his balls pull tight, but then he was letting go. It was so perfect, so exactly how he'd always imagined making love to his mate would be. Dean's body kept squeezing and he kept coming for what seemed like forever. 

Later, Dean was falling asleep, still cradled on top of John's chest. John was still hard, still inside Dean, Dean's pussy gripping the shaft of his cock tight, even if his knot was on the outside. There was no doubt that they were meant to be mates, even if they couldn't tie up just yet. Yes, this was how it was meant to be. This was where they were both of meant to be. Mating an Omega like this was both duty and privilege, an Alpha was supposed to be taught. But this was far, far more than a duty to John. This was an opportunity he thought he'd never have and a bliss he thought he'd never know again.

"You okay, sweetheart?" he asked, disturbing his sleeping mate, true, but he had to know for sure and he had to know that Dean knew he meant so much more to John than just the physical part of this. That this hadn't added to Dean's trauma seemed pretty obvious. Dean was lax, just about boneless. His trust in his Alpha protecting him while he slept seemed total. A pleased, little smile played on his lips as he drifted.

"Yeah," Dean said. He nuzzled against John's chest, trying to find a comfortable spot to lay his face on that hairy surface. "'m good."

"I love you so much," John said. "I need to know you know."

"Yeah, never doubted you, Alpha," Dean said. Then he closed his eyes, murmuring something that sounded like, "Love you too."

***

John made his way through Greenville cemetery. It was early November and dead leaves crunched under his feet. He carried a bouquet of flowers he'd picked up as an afterthought. Mary wasn't here, not really. It was just a stone marker, not even one he'd picked out. Her uncle had picked it out, paid for it and the gravesite. It was just a symbol for the woman she had been, but it would have to do. It was twenty-two years since her death, nearly twelve years since he and Dean had mated. He'd visited her a couple of times, but mostly she was just a sad, faded memory. He didn't want to forget her completely as she'd given him the greatest gift he'd ever received. He wasn't sure why it seemed that this was the right time to visit again, but it had seemed like the year for it. 

He tossed the flowers on her grave. Then he started pulling weeds and talking.

"Hey, Mare," he said, squatting down, laying a hand on her marker. "I just thought you'd want to know Dean's having another baby. Our third. We weren't planning on another, but his hormones got the better of us. I'm getting too old to for more babies, but Dean's so happy about it. We're finally having a girl this time. Dean's doing well. So well. You'd be so proud of him if you were here. He passed his nursing exams, did better than pass. He's a nurse in the PICU. He saves lives. He doesn't have to work. We still have money from that settlement but it's a calling for him."

"You know, I almost lost him. I almost let him get destroyed because I wasn't paying attention. He. Well, you would kick my ass if you saw what I let happen to him because I wasn't there when he needed me. But I like to think we pulled it out. He's so good now. You know, I did the thing you would have hated. I raised him in hunting. I went a little crazy for a while. I put revenging you over taking care of our boys and you would have killed me for that. It took Dean nearly getting killed before I realized just how precious he was to me. To us. That the best thing I could have done to honor your memory was to raise them the best way I could. Not chasing after a nightmare. 

"You'd be so proud of Sam too. He had all the best schools in the country chasing after him, if you can believe that. Harvard. Princeton. He went to Stanford, going to their law school on a full scholarship now. It about killed me to let him go across country by himself, but he's strong. Brave. The kind of Alpha that makes you proud to be one yourself. He's got this girl named Jess. She's smart and kind. Pretty. You'd love her.

"And my other babies. Dean and my kids. You never met them, but I like to think you'd love them too. That you'd have given Dean and me your blessing. James and Robert are their names. They're eleven and six. Blond like you. Like Dean was when he was a little kid. It breaks my heart to know you'll never meet them."

"I still miss you," John admitted. "I don't think I ever won't, but I like to think you'd be happy for me and Dean. That's all. I just thought you'd want to know he's happy."

As he walked away from the gravesite, he passed a dead tree. Not an unusual sight in a graveyard, but the strange thing was that there was a perfect circle of dead vegetation it was part of. Some bad mojo had gone off here not long ago, something evil was at the source of it. Something like he used to hunt. He pulled out his phone, snapped a quick photo of the scene and sent it off to Bobby with the co-ordinates and the text, 'something here for you too look into.'

Bobby would dispatch someone. He'd built up a team of hunters. Yeah, he'd given John shit for a little while when he'd realized John had dropped out of hunting but then the man had figured out why John had done it and that it was for Dean's sake. That had shut him up quick and permanently. After he'd spent a good hour interrogating John about things, making sure that John was only doing what Dean wanted. Sometimes, it felt like Bobby was more like a father-in-law than a friend, he was that protective of Dean. It'd taken a while until Bobby was convinced that John only wanted what was best for Dean too. 

Picture taken and sent, John hurried back to the car, the Impala borrowed from Dean for the occasion. He'd given the car to his mate as a twenty-first birthday present. Both of them drove more practical models most of the time, what with the kids to think about, but it had seemed like the right car to bring on this road trip. John wanted to get back home now. It wasn't that Dean grudged him the time or anything like that, but John had a pregnant mate with swollen feet that needed rubbing and an eleven year old that he needed to toss a softball with and a six year old that would want a story read to him. The kind of things he'd missed out on with his first family, he wasn't going to miss a second of this time around.


End file.
